Kathleen Parker: "Clean Energy Bill Won't Move Us Away From Foreign Fuel Sources"

Columnist Kathleen Parker writes in "Clean Energy Bill Won't Move Us Away From Foreign Fuel Sources" that the Waxman-Markey climate bill recently passed by the House and now awaiting Senate passage of a similar bill won't actually help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. So it won't help our security situation vis-à-vis the Middle East.

"The more we cap our carbon," writes Parker,

... the happier the Saudis are. That's because most Middle Eastern crude is more easily accessible and requires less processing than what we and our friendlier neighbors [such as Canada] can produce. ...

Basically, the energy bill focuses primarily on stationary sources of carbon dioxide emissions (power and manufacturing plants) and would do little to address mobile sources of emissions, i.e. transportation. ...

Although the bill would put refined gasoline consumption under the cap along with coal, natural gas, etc., the baseline for counting reductions is 2003. The reductions in oil consumption already required by [recently enacted] CAFE and biofuels bills may exceed for many years the requirements of Waxman-Markey.

CAFE is "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" for automobiles. Under current law, car fuel ecomony has to be increased by the automakers by about 30 percent.

A recently passed biofuels bill, meanwhile, "requires the blending [into gasoline] of 36 billion gallons of biofuels ... or about 20 percent of total liquid fuel consumption."


That the House bill won't bring down our usage of gasoline and other fuels that derive from petroleum comes as a shock.

Again, the problem seems to be that the House bill doesn't tighten existing CAFE and biofuels legislation. By setting the baseline for capping carbon emissions from transportation as late as 2003, Waxman-Markey fails to put the squeeze on those emissions until years down the road, when the emissions cap finally becomes a shoe that actually pinches some petro-toes.

This blogger feels that setting up the House bill that way may have been one of those ploys necessary to getting the bill passed. Legislative sausage-making is never pretty.

On the other hand, in earlier posts in support of the House bill, such as Thomas L. Friedman: Just Do It, I certainly failed to indicate (because I didn't know) that the bill won't in and of itself reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels for a good long time.

Now that I know that, I realize what one of the reasons why the House bill won't cut U.S. greenhouse emissions by any more than 17 percent below 2005 levels is: it won't bring down the use of fossil-derived gasoline and diesel fuel any further than existing CAFE and biofuels laws already would have, all by themselves.