For Senate, a Climate of Competing Interests appeared as a news story on Tuesday, August 4, 2009. By Steven Mufson and David A. Fahrenthold, Post reporters who cover the environment and related economic issues, the piece touched on the views of upcoming climate legislation being taken by various key U.S. senators and the lobby groups trying to influence them. "The House climate bill ... ballooned to 1,427 pages, stuffed with compromises that benefited industries from corn to coal," the article says. Now, the same lobbies that puffed so much air into that huge House balloon want it inflated even more in the Senate. Is that any way to run a bicameral legislature? Apparently, yes.
August 2 saw the editorial Warming Relations, subtitled "Despite lingering disagreements, the U.S. and China are making noteworthy progress on climate change," in which The Post's editorialist wrote about the upcoming-in-December multinational talks on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. If key countries — read, the U.S. and China — can finally agree to terms, a Copenhagen-engendered new accord could replace the 10-year-old, soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol (which those two countries never signed).
Which leads this blogger to wonder: what is the rationale for our passing a climate bill in advance of Copenhagen? If Copenhagen puts tighter strictures on greenhouse-gas emissions than the U.S. bill does, the bill would have to be reworked. If it doesn't, then both the bill and the Copenhagen accord would, I would think, need to be reworked.
I've already covered (in Kathleen Parker: "Clean Energy Bill Won't Move Us Away From Foreign Fuel Sources") that columnist's August 2 revelation that "the reductions in oil consumption already required by [recently enacted] CAFE and biofuels bills may exceed for many years the requirements of" the House bill that would ostensibly, but not actually, reduce greenhouse emissions from America's tailpipes.
My take on that: the House bill does a lot (but not enough) to cut down on emissions from U.S. smokestacks. Moreover, through so-called "carbon offsets," it provides (in the words of the Mufson-Fahrenthold article) "programs that allow farmers to be paid for no-till agriculture that keeps carbon in the soil" — though senators like Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin want yet more leniency along those lines. But in my opinion and that of Parker tailpipe emissions from powering cars with gasoline and trucks with diesel fuel aren't reined in enough.
That's why I question What Palin Got Wrong About Energy, the July 24 op-ed piece by leading U.S. senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.), when they say that "clean energy legislation ... works to find alternative solutions to our costly dependence on foreign oil ... ." If Parker is right, the House bill doesn't really do that. (We'll see if the eventual Senate bill does.)
Boxer and Kerry were taking umbrage with an earlier (July 14) opinion piece by resigned Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican who may be angling for a presidential bid, who wrote in A 'Cap and Tax' Dead End that "President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan ... is an enormous threat to our economy." Her reasoning: cap and trade would supposedly put a huge crimp in the "abundant, affordable energy" that Americans have always relied on for prosperity, opportunity, and security. Palin writes, "Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs."
The best argument against her position — and I am against it — comes from John Doerr and Jeff Immelt, writing in the August 3 Post opinion pages. Doerr, a financier, is a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Immelt, a corporate executive, is chairman and chief executive of General Electric. In Green Tech Needs a Green Light they give their scenario for jump-starting a new, clean-energy economy:
- Send a long-term market signal that low-carbon energy is valuable, by putting a steadily increasing price on carbon emissions.
- Give electric utilities economic incentives to switch to renewable electricity; mandate that a certain percentage of their power generation come from renewable sources such as wind and solar; build a unified smart grid to distribute clean electric power nationwide.
- Set energy-efficiency standards that grow steadily stronger.
- Have the federal government spend much, much more than it now does on funding clean-energy research and development.
- Institute "a robust trade policy" that will make us "the world's leading exporter of renewable energy."
This blogger has yet to run into any detailed explanation of why Item #1, a steady, reliably increasing price on carbon emissions, which a cap-and-trade system would bring about, wouldn't be enough, all by itself, to push us into a clean-energy future. Okay, I see that Item #5, "a robust trade policy," would also help, and that the "smart grid" of Item #2 might need federal kick-starting. But why federal incentives, mandates, standards, and R&D funding are necessary to get clean energy "to scale" beats me. One would think a tight cap on carbon and the price mechanism that the "trade" aspect of "cap and trade" would bring about would send greenhouse-gas emitters scurrrying to the providers of clean energy, without any further help from Uncle Sam.
Such details aside, clearly a well-crafted climate policy would make new jobs for Americans, bigtime. But, admittedly, it's a riddle and a perplexity whether the 1,427-page House bill would, on net, constitute such a policy.
Also a riddle and a perplexity is whether the "Cash for Clunkers" program helps or hurts the environment. Gwen Ottinger says the program, which pays consumers to buy new, fuel-efficient cars to replace aging gas guzzlers, hurts. In her August 4 op-ed article When the Clunker Is Greener, Ottinger, a program researcher in environmental history and policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Center for Contemporary History and Policy in Philadelphia, points out that it would have been greener for the government to allow clunkers to be traded in for, say, a used 2001 Toyota Prius hybrid. It "gets upward of 40 mpg, and even a 15-year-old Honda Civic gets 28," she writes, so why did the program insist on new replacements only? She adds:
By assuming that only new products can be environmentally friendly, these policies lead us to discount the environmental gains that could be made through well-established and low-tech means, such as smaller refrigerators. They also reinforce the idea that all products, even "durable goods," quickly become obsolete — a notion that leads to overwhelming amounts of environment-despoiling waste.
Or, better still, why not encourage car owners to just drive their clunkers into the ground? She notes:
... even when new cars and appliances are more efficient than the ones they replace, the act of replacing them entails environmental costs not accounted for in the stimulus programs. Building a new car, washing machine or refrigerator takes energy and resources: The manufacture of steel, aluminum and plastics are energy-intensive processes, and some of the materials used in durable goods, especially plastics, use non-renewable fossil fuels as feedstocks as well as energy sources. Disposing of old products, a step required by most incentive and rebate programs, also has environmental costs: It takes additional energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes.
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