New Climate Bill Proof of Misplaced Priorities

The draft Markey-Waxman climate bill is proof that the green groups leading the climate charge won't fight for investments in clean energy technologies and a new energy economy. Instead, they'll throw these critical investments overboard to preserve precious regulations and an increasingly compromised "cap" on carbon.

by Jesse Jenkins

Marking the starting bell in the long-promised fight over the nation's energy future, Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a climate and energy legislation "discussion draft" yesterday.

As Beltway insiders have repeatedly "reminded" me, this is "just a discussion draft," and its final form may be much different. But just looking at what's in this bill so far -- and just as important, what's not -- paints a clear picture of misplaced priorities and a bill in critical need of some "course correction."

Even a cursory read of this "American Clean Energy and Security Act" (ACES) -- and I've read far more of this 648 page bill than I'd like! -- speaks volumes to the priorities of the various parties driving this debate so far - namely the green groups and big industry players already cutting deals as part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. This bill should be proof, once and for all, these leading greens will throw clean energy investments overboard to preserve precious regulations and an increasingly compromised "cap" on carbon.

Let's start with highlights from what's in the bill:

Standards and regulations galore, including a 25% by 2025 renewable electricity standard, building efficiency codes, appliance efficiency standards, a utility energy efficiency resource standard, fuel economy standards, a low-carbon fuel standard and industrial efficiency standards.
A cap and trade program, which while buried in Title III of the bill is still the core of the ACES draft. To alleviate concerns that this effort to increase the price of dirty energy will cost too much, the so-called "cap" has plenty of hot air stuffed under it, including a heavy reliance on an unprecedented amount of carbon offsets and provisions that allow emissions permits to be borrowed from the future, increasing the amount of allowed emissions if prices get too high. With this as the starting point and powerful political opposition to measures to increases energy prices, this "cap" on carbon will almost certainly get even further riddled with holes as the debate continues.
The only technology-related spending specified by the bill from the get-go is a one billion a year dedicated fund for the development of carbon capture and storage technology for coal plants. The coal technology fund is financed by a separate dedicated micro-carbon tax on electricity producers funneled directly to support grants, loans and financing for CCS demonstration projects, modeled on a bill introduced by influential energy committee member and coal-industry champion, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA).
The bill also "authorizes" spending for plug-in hybrid car demonstrations, support for electric vehicle batteries, and smart grid demonstrations - all critical clean energy technologies. But in Congress-speak, "authorization" means that until funds are "appropriated" or dedicated from the carbon revenues, there's no telling how much money Congress is really set to invest, leaving me saying "Show me the money!"
And when it comes to tackling the critical energy innovation challenge, that's it. There ain't no more. No long-term strategic investments to develop and deploy the clean and affordable energy technologies needed to power the 21st century global economy. No effort to spark the transformative technological breakthroughs Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said are necessary. And nothing resembling President Obama's pledge to invest $15 billion a year from cap and trade revenues on clean energy R&D.
After years of assuring my colleagues at the Breakthrough Institute that "we want both clean energy investments and a carbon price," these USCAP greens, the most influential green groups setting the climate agenda in Washington today, have shown their true priorities. With billions of carbon revenue dollars sitting on the table, the green groups leading the climate charge simply walked away and left it there.

How do I know the likes of EDF, NRDC didn't fight for clean energy investments (and if others did, they certainly did not succeed)? Well let's rewind back to take a look at the last climate bill draft introduced by Congressman Markey, now chair of the key energy subcommittee responsible for shepherding this bill to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives...

Called iCAP, short for "Investing in Climate Action and Protection," Markey introduced his ideal vision of a climate and energy bill in June 2008. As he introduced the bill, Congressman Markey spoke eloquently about the need to "invest in the American economy and in American workers, and launch an energy technology renaissance that will rival the information technology revolution of the past decade." Markey's iCAP bill promised to use the money from carbon pollution permits to "invest tens of billions" each year to develop and deploy "the cutting-edge low-carbon energy technologies that will power America's future."

So what happened to Markey's investment ambitions? The United States Climate Action Partnership did. USCAP is the coalition (or should I say cabal) of mainstream green groups like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council and a dozen or so industry giants, including ALCOA, Duke Energy, Dupont, GE, ConocoPhillips and General Motors, and their fingerprints are all over this discussion draft. The official summary of the bill openly declares that "the global warming provisions ... are modeled closely on the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership."

In the boardrooms of EDF and the DC offices of USCAP's industry lobbyists, deals have already been cut, deals designed to "preserve" an increasingly compromised effort on the part of greens to increase the price of carbon while giving special treatment to these defenders of the old energy economy. With friends like these, there's no wonder Ed Markey and Henry Waxman delivered the discussion draft we see today.

At the core of the Markey-Waxman bill is a set of misplaced priorities and objectives. Rather than embrace the scale of the energy innovation challenge and design policies necessary to spur the transformational innovation needed to overcome it, these green groups (and many who listen to them) have come to believe their own politically-motivated and self-propogated myth that "we have all the technologies we need" to fundamentally and completely transform our massive global energy system to a low-carbon at an urgent pace. They therefore design the policy in front of us: a weak carbon pricing effort coupled with requirements for improved energy efficiency and a clean energy deployment strategy (namely a renewable electricity standard) only capable of driving the deployment of already mature and relatively affordable clean energy sources like wind power and conventional geothermal.

If you think all we need is the immature and limited suite of technologies on the shelf today, or if you buy into the market fundamentalist, cavalier assumption that markets will simply deliver the requisite innovation, why would you do anything else?

There's still time for this discussion draft to change, of course. Unfortunately, many of the inexorable political pressures acting on this bill will only weaken the strategy driven by USCAP's green groups. The question really remains: will other climate groups, members of Congress, or the White House itself reject this strategy, reassert the right priorities, and demand investments to overcome the energy innovation challenge while truly acting as the engine of the new clean energy economy so often promised? In the coming months, we'll all find the answer...

© 2009 Breakthrough Institute

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Published on Friday, April 3, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Obama Must Heed Alarm Bells on Global Warming
by Karyn Strickler

Last weekend, thousands of volunteers from surrounding states braved freezing temperatures to help people of North Dakota and Minnesota stuff sand bags for levee enhancements in a mostly successful attempt to contain the historic rise of the Red River. Twisters ripped through Mississippi, injuring scores of people, while a blizzard blasted Colorado and the Gulf coast endured yet another beating from severe storms.

Simultaneously, alarm bells rang in the Arctic. Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska said in New Science. "The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."

Methane is about 20 times more powerful than the original catalyst for global warming, carbon dioxide. We have entered the dreaded period where secondary effects of global warming could take the climate challenge completely out of our control.

As the world prepares to meet at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to set standards for cutting greenhouse gases, President Barack Obama's historic opportunity to set policy to reverse climate change is fleeting. The United States may be unfashionably late to the meeting unless we have our own, meaningful climate policy in place before December.

In the economic stimulus package, President Obama dedicated billions for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Obama promises 5 million new, green jobs that cannot be outsourced, boosting our economy. We recently got word that mountain-top removal coal mining has been put on hold, at least temporarily.

These colossal changes would have been unimaginable even a few months ago. So what's the problem?

Carbon Cap and Trade: Cap Yes, Trade No

Put simply, the carbon trading that President Obama supports is an unenforceable, shell game that allows polluters to pay to pollute. Shifting greenhouse gas pollution around is not going to result in the dramatic cuts in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases that we need. The New York Times reported failures in Europe last December, "Four years later, it is becoming clear that system [cap and trade] has so far produced little noticeable benefit to the climate - but generated a multibillion-dollar windfall for some of the Continent's biggest polluters."

President Obama proposes that we cap or reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below that by 2050. While his proposal is more ambitious than most current local or state-level proposals, given the magnitude of the problem, those reductions are inadequate to the challenge that we face.

Susan Solomon, a climate scientist with NOAA, recently concluded that climate change is irreversible. Rather than a reason for despair, Solomon sees her conclusion as a reason to get our solution right. James Hansen, top climate scientist at NASA said, "We can still roll things back, but it is going to require a quick turn in direction."

We must see this serious situation as an opportunity for transcendent change, a chance for American ingenuity and creativity to shine once more. But our timeline for getting it right is short. We cannot continue business as usual even for a few more decades.

In his paper, Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Society Aim, Hansen said recently, "The evidence indicates...that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm."

Nearly 2 decades ago, in their first scientific assessment, the statured scientists of the International Panel on Climate Change told us that "In order to stabilize concentrations at present day concentrations (353 ppm), an immediate reduction in global anthropogenic emissions by 60-80 percent would be necessary."

Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute believes that in order to reach 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to cut carbon dioxide 80% below 1990 levels by 2020, several generations sooner than the Obama Administration proposal.

Fossil Fuel vs. Renewable Energy Economy

More broadly, America must kick the fossil fuel habit. America's dependence on fossil fuel is still gouging us at the gas pump. Home heating and cooling costs are skyrocketing. The fossil fuel economy is stoking wars in the Middle East, fouling our air and water, jeopardizing our national security and exacerbating catastrophic climate change.

President Obama acknowledges that our dependence on other nations for fossil fuels imperils the national security of the United States which now depends on propping up a few shaky authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

But he still extols the virtues of so-called clean coal. Regardless of how it is processed, all coal is a dirty, polluting, non-renewable energy source, contributing up to 40% of fossil fuel related carbon dioxide. An average coal plant in the United States produces 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The miasma that is coal, cannot be cleaned. Coal plants also emit carbon monoxide, mercury, arsenic and lead, all poisonous in high amounts. In addition, while temporarily prohibited, coal mining companies engage in the heinous practice known as mountain-top removal, annihilating the subtle, ancient beauty of our Appalachian Mountains and streams.

Residents of Tennessee are still dealing with a coal ash spill that released billions of gallons of toxic sludge. The New York Times reports that there are more 1300 similar dumps across the country, mostly unmonitored. They contain poisonous slime and are vulnerable to collapse, threatening water supplies and human health.

We must move beyond fossil fuels altogether, especially so-called clean coal, a phony, public relations term designed by the fossil fuel industry to promote their lethal product. Clean, renewable, non-nuclear energy -- like solar, wind and geothermal -- is the basis upon which we must rebuild if our economy and our planet are to survive and thrive.

Although we need to get 100% of our energy from renewable sources within 10 years, President Obama says on his website, we must "ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025."

If this were an ordinary issue incremental, politically palatable steps made over the long term may be appropriate. But gentle approaches don't make sense when our survival on this planet may depend on a swift, dramatic response. If President Obama wants to bend the arc of history toward a planet that can sustain human civilization, the time for bold leadership is at hand.

Karyn Strickler is a writer, political scientist and grassroots organizer. She is the founder and chair of HOTTPAC.org, working to elect candidates to reverse catastrophic climate change. Contact her at Karyn (at) hottpac.org or visit the website at www.hottpac.org.