Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish — Doing Better on Climate Change

The Boxer-Lieberman-Warner (S 2191) cap-and-trade bill died a death Friday when it couldn’t get past a Republican filibuster.The bill would have created a carbon cap and trade emissions market that would have required power plants, refineries and factories to pay for the privileges of polluting the environment and contributing to global warming. This bill aims to cap and reduce emissions roughly 19 percent below today’s levels by 2020 and 70 percent by 2050.

But this bill has many fatal flaws including:

• Pollution reduction goals that don’t go far enough. The current best science (as detailed in the IPCC) would require a reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by covered sectors by 85 percent by 2050. (This reduction is to keep temperatures from rising another 3.5 degrees) The Senate legislation does not achieve all the reductions that will likely be needed, and certainly as fast as climate change science is evolving, it seems reasonable to expect the ability to accommodate quicker or greater reductions in the future.

• Emission allowances in a cap and trade system need to be auctioned off to businesses that want them and not simply given away. Subsidizing polluting industries undermines the whole point of cap and trade.
• Proceeds from the emissions allowance auctions need to be used to fund conservation, transition to renewables, and research on renewables. There are huge economic opportunities in renewable energy (especially those that can achieve cost competitiveness soon) AND the business of cleaning up emissions from current operating plants is quite real and employs high wage scientists and engineers. This is an emerging industry that is a natural for our leadership — we should be the ones licensing and exporting clean technologies to places like India and China and the European countries, not simply importing someone else’s ingenuity.

• Too many embedded subsidies to fossil fuel industries. Something like 25% of the available permits would be handed over for things like “transition assistance” and the currently untested carbon sequestration. Again, undermining the whole point of the system.

• Then, of course, as the bill came to the floor and started getting amended, Senators were adding more subsidies to airlines, more for the coal industries, nuclear power (largely added to buy votes) and a requirement for importers to buy allowances on goods from countries that do not attempt to control their emissions.

Boxer and Liberman were busily congratulating themselves for even getting as far as they did on this bill while repubs were busy demonizing the overall costs (figures they mostly made up) of the bill (including all of the costs they helped to add to further subsidize the fossil fuel and nuclear industries), then claiming an undue burden on consumers. Which, given th amount of taxpayer funds they want to hand over to fossil fuel and nuclear industries can’t be too much of a surprise. But I dearly wish that Dems had made the repubs produce the magic fairy dust that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants for free. Obama, Clinton and McCain are on record supporting this (although McCain has flip flopped on some provisions) mess of a bill and I wish that Senator Boxer would rethink her position on this in light of another, stronger cap and trade bill that may be introduced in the House.

The better bill that supports the reduction of greenhouse gasses is Congressman Ed Markey’s iCAP bill. This bill does establish GHG caps at the levels recommended by science AND it auctions off all emissions allowances. Money raised by the auctions are used specifically for transition to lower emission energy technology and almost half of that capital is returned to low and middle income households to offset any additional costs. Polluters can decide how they participate — by buying allowances and doing business as usual or by installing the equipment or processes to reduce the GHG emissions. This is pretty much the way the reduction in acid rain levels were archived in the 90’s — and most of the targeted polluters chose to either install scrubbers or to change fuels to avoid having to buy emissions allowances.

Markey’s bill is definitely the one to watch, and while he thought it would be introduced in the next week or so, there is no word from Nancy Pelosi as to whether she will bring it to a vote. Obama issued a statement after the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill died saying that he did support the work on this bill (boo) and would support a stronger bill — one with targets more in line with the current science (yea!), so perhaps we are in for a stronger stance on this if Obama is in the White House in January.