Utilities, Coal-State Dems are Wrecking Our Last Chance on Climate Change
by Mike Tidwell - May 20th, 2009
in
Utility companies and their coal-state apologists in Congress are wrecking America’s last, best chance to solve global warming.
By insisting on free pollution permits, utilities are creating a climate bill that is complicated, unfair and destined to fail in future years. It’s now up to New York Congressman Charles Rangel (see video) and the House Ways and Means Committee to fix the problem.
The much-discussed Waxman-Markey bill on global warming now proposes to give 35 percent of all carbon pollution permits to utilities for free. Another 45 percent will go free-of-charge to other carbon-intensive industries, but utilities are least deserving by far.
Last year, America’s 48 largest utilities earned profits of $28 billion. And last month, in a study requested by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the EPA determined that allowing utilities to pollute for free under a global warming bill would drive up the overall cost of the program and would hurt poor people the most.
But this is about more than social justice and corporate welfare. Free permits weaken the most important tool within the Waxman-Markey bill: the carbon cap.
By giving away permits, the bill introduces complexity, potential gaming, and probable delay into a cap system. It thus reduces our ability to save the climate and avoid 20 feet of sea-level rise in places like downtown Washington, D.C.
A strong, workable cap is everything. Imagine a patient who has a curable form of cancer. Should you prescribe pain medication? Yes. A healthy diet and physical therapy? Yes. But the most important thing is treating the actual cancer with surgery or other means. The goal is to cure the disease.
With global warming, we can invest in “green jobs” and a ban on deforestation as well as improved levees for places like New Orleans. But unless we treat the core “disease” that’s driving climate change – unbridled fossil fuel use – we will only be putting band-aids on symptoms. Without a strong cap on carbon, none of our other actions will really matter.
Waxman’s House committee – Energy and Commerce – has already committed itself to an intricate approach called “cap and trade.” This creates a system of tradable carbon permits that might be effective if properly structured. But given Wall Street’s recent demise via trading in complex mortgage derivatives, it’s no wonder many Americans are wary of talk of a specialized market in tradable carbon.
Now, on top of this, utilities want their tradable pollution permits to be free, at least during the first decade or so. The utilities argue this is the best way to protect consumers from rising electricity prices under a cap. They promise to return the “value” of the pollution permits to ratepayers in the form of rate reductions, efficiency projects, and other “public benefit” programs administered by the electric companies themselves.
Really? Does anyone believe this is the best way to protect consumers?
Why not auction all the pollution permits, cut out the middle man, and transfer the money directly to citizens? No freebies. The sky doesn’t belong to Virginia Dominion Power or Pacific Gas and Electric. It belongs to all Americans. If a company wants to pollute our sky, it should pay a fee just like a landfill fee, and that money should go to you.
This was the simple, fair solution President Obama campaigned on last fall: 100 percent carbon auction with most of the money rebated to taxpayers.
Thankfully, the House Ways and Means committee now has jurisdictional power to fix the Waxman-Markey bill. Rangel should strip out all free permits to utilities and rebate the auction money to American citizens in the form of a monthly direct “dividend.”
Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has already introduced a “cap and dividend” bill within Ways and Means. That bill should serve as a vital guide to Rangel and colleagues as they go to work in the coming weeks.
Again, the goal is to create the strongest possible carbon cap. To be strong, the cap must be simple and fair. Achieve these two features and voters will support it for the fifty years it takes to squeeze carbon out of our economy. Fail at these two features and the patient will remain tragically sick for many years to come.
See also:
Clean Energy Climate Bill Gives Coal a Competitive Future
Polluters' War on Climate Legislation Is Taking a Toll
Greenpeace: We Cannot Support This Climate Bill
Mike Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network
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Time for change is at hand, but we are dawdling
The family of humanity appears to be in clear & present danger because the Masters of the Universe among us are willfully denying one of God’s greatest gifts: humankind’s carefully and skillfully developed science on human-induced climate change.
Faulty reasoning, contrived logic, ideological idiocy, arrogance, material obsessiveness, greed, linear thinking and a mechanistic world view, all of which we see pervading the predominant culture in our time, could result in the children following their misguided elders down a patently unsustainable “primrose path” only to be confronted by a colossal ecologic and/or economic wreckage, the likes of which only Ozymandias has seen.
Can it be that acceptable standards for determining what is real and true in our culture today have not much to do with science? Consider that whatsoever the Masters of the Universe instruct their minions to proclaim vociferously, share widely, consensually validate and judge to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated is true and real…. scientific evidence of the biophysical conditions of the natural world we inhabit notwithstanding.
At least to me, it seems that God’s science is censored, gag rules imposed and countless distractions presented whenever reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians prescribe to be real and true. Perhaps science does present the leaders of the predominant culture on Earth with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
please explain "potential gaming"
My understanding is that in EU ETS Phase 1, the utilities gamed the system because no entity was regulating how they used their free permits. But in Waxman-Markey free permits only go to regulated utilities; state regulators would enforce the pass through of value to ratepayers. Doesn't this solve the problem? Where is the gaming?
The theory of human caused warming has already been disproved
The scientific data already proves that human produced changes in CO2 are not a major driver of global climate, never mind the primary driver of global climate. The planet has been in a cooling trend since 1998. If this were only a surface-temperature trend, it could still be consistent with the theory that the small amount of late 20th century warming was caused by human CO2 emissions, since the warming effect of continued CO2 emissions could be getting stored in sub-surface ocean water. But ocean temperature measurements show the opposite: that for the last five years, the entire ocean has been cooling. (See Graig Loehle, “Cooling of the global ocean since 2003,” 2009. Energy and Environment. Volume 20, No. 1&2, p.101-104. See also, Roger Pilke, “A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system,” Physics Today, Nov. 2008, p.54-55.)
Not only does this falsify the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming, but it is powerful evidence for the leading alternate explanation for late 20th century warming: that it was caused by the extraordinarily high levels of solar-magnetic activity between 1945 and 2000. The sun has been in an extended lull for the last five years, and the cooling we have experienced over that period is exactly what the theory of solar-magnetic warming predicts.
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