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Flash:
At least three amendments dealing with carbon emissions are being
offered in the Senate to tack on to the massive Energy Bill. This comes
after the Republican House managed to pass the 1,000-plus-page Energy
Policy Act of 2005 without mentioning global warming or climate
change—a stunning achievement.
The good news, perhaps, is that
the emissions amendments, which I’ll try to summarize below, signal the
first time that at least some of our august senators have stopped
toeing the Bush administration’s insensate line that climate change
science is unproven, so trying to limit or reduce American greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions would damage the economy with no certain gain for
the environment. The new epiphany could signal that the long and
fruitless debate on whether global warming is real is over. It is real.
The
bad news is that the three amendments offered are either so weak as to
be merely place markers on the road to ruin or else come with onerous
tradeoffs that render them meaningless in the context of an Energy Bill
that pushes energy production and supply into high gear with subsidies,
incentives and fastrack permitting for everything from offshore oil
drilling to coal to nuclear power.
Here are the three amendments, as reported today in The Boston Globe:
1)
The McCain-Lieberman amendment would leave GHG emissions unregulated
until 2010, then cap emissions at that level and allow emissions
trading/purchasing between all covered entities, defined as having at
least one facility which emits more than 10,000 metric tons of GHG per
year, such as electric utilities, manufacturers, oil refiners, etc. The
tradeoff in McCain-Lieberman, not mentioned in the Globe article but
which you can find on Lieberman’s Web site:
some of the funds generated by auctioning permits would go toward
construction loans for three new-generation nuclear facilities. McCain
is a big booster of nuclear, and has brought on board some fairly
big-name greens. While there’s no question that nuclear power does not
add to climate change, there are still important questions about
nuclear power’s safety, and what to do with the nuclear waste. The
whole subject warrants more discussion than is possible in this post,
but for a reasonably good intro to both McCain’s gambit and the
pro-nuke greens, see Jeff Young’s report on Public Radio’s Living on Earth.
2)
The Bingaman amendment, offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico),
which would leave carbon emissions unregulated till 2010, then install
a cap and trade system to bring GHGs to the 2012 level by 2020. Don’t
ask TEI to make sense of this, but Bingaman’s proposal would also allow
companies emitting above their limit to simply buy their way out by
paying the government $7 per metric ton of carbon dioxide over cap. At
least under Bingaman’s proposal those funds, estimated at $35 billion
over 10 years, would be used to develop renewables. Bingaman is wooing
Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) to team up on his plan. Domenici is
not only a fellow New Mexicano, but chairman of the Senate Energy and
Natural Resources Committee. Bingaman is ranking minority member. Looks
like a match to me.
3) Sen. Chuck Hagel’s (R-Nebraska)
amendment is the only one of the three that includes no cap and trade
system. His plan would devote major tax breaks and loans to company’s
that volunteer to cut their emissions or develop emissions-cutting
technologies. Hagel’s big point, which he flogs in speeches and other
communiques is that the United States cannot engage the Kyoto system
because it doesn’t restrict developing countries like China and India.
Here’s what Hagel said in a winter speech to the Brookings Institution
re Kyoto: “Its approach is unrealistic. Any reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions by the United States and other developed countries will soon
be eclipsed by emissions from developing nations, such as China, which
will soon be the world’s largest emitter of manmade greenhouse gases.”
Completely untrue: China is two or three decades away from emitting
anything close to what the United States does and India even further.
Nevertheless, Hagel’s amendment is likely to flop because, despite his
rhetoric about the supremacy of the private sector, his plan is
basically a government giveaway to the private sector. And it doesn’t
begin to integrate the United States economy into the coming global GHG
emissions reduction regime. As I learned covering a Conference Board
conference this week in New York on corporate energy management, many
of the world’s largest companies, which operate in Europe, Canada and
Japan, where Kyoto’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) is coming into
effect, believe that emissions trading is here to stay. To quote Al
Forte, a Pfizer executive: “I think we are moving toward a
carbon-constrained economy. Carbon is going to be the largest commodity
market on the planet, eventually.”
Meanwhile, for a really rich
take on the new politics of energy, you need go no further than the
Frankenstein of the media, dean of American journalism senility, Robert
Novak, who painted, in his column
today, a movie noir of intrigue, conspiracy and paranoia. Novak thinks
the whole issue of global warming and climate change is an evil
subterfuge by Swedes and Chinamen and Green degenerates to ruin the
American and European economies. He says Tony Blair insidiuously
lobbied behind the back of Bush on global warming when he was here last
week. I love his “proof” that curbing GHG emissions has already wrecked
Europe. Bob: please wake up! The European ETS just went into effect. It
hasn’t had time to destroy the Euro economy, yet.
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