U.S. Reps. Ed Markey and Jay Inslee spent the morning trying to get a straight answer out of two executives involved in a forged letter scandal that threatened to sink the House climate bill earlier this year.
Their inquiry boiled down to one simple question: Why didn’t you tell Congress?
The answer they came away with was never spoken by the executives — Steve Miller, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), and Jack Bonner, president and founder of Bonner & Associates. Instead, it was pieced together by the two lawmakers from the timing and a paper trail. In Markey’s words:
“It was clear that it was going to be a very close vote. And it was clear that it was going to be in the coal coalition’s interest to not correct the record.”
This summer, Congress will decide whether or not to pass a comprehensive climate bill in the form of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). Until now, one big question was unanswered: Will it be too expensive?
The CBO's cost estimate projects that the climate bill would help reduce federal budget deficits by $24 billion over a decade.
ACES would raise $846 billion in its first decade, almost entirely through a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases intended to prompt companies to reduce their carbon emissions. During the same time period, the federal government would spend $821 billion through programs related to the bill.
The CBO report rebuts opponents of the bill who have claimed that it would be too costly.
“This certainly helps make the case for passage,” says Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress.
“It won’t all of a sudden convince someone who is opposed to support it. That doesn’t happen. But it does take away a very important opponents’ talking point – something that the American people care about – which is the deficit.”
Congressman Ed Markey hinted today at how CO2 emissions allowances might be divvied up under a national cap-and-trade program. He also spelled out a strong incentive for detractors in Congress to change their tune – three letters: EPA.
Markey, the chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee and one of the architects of the comprehensive climate bill headed for Congress, was speaking at a symposium on climate legislation at MIT along with President Obama’s chief advisor on energy and climate change, Carol Browner, and presidential science advisor John Holdren.
An audience member asked how quickly the proposed cap-and-trade program would reach 100 percent auction of the emissions allowances.
Markey's answer made it clear that cap-and-trade won't start with a 100 percent auction and that the Obama administration is concerned about the impact on competitive trade, particularly when it comes to China:
“Initially, at least, we have to set aside a certain amount of the carbon credits to ensure that the steel, the paper and other trade-sensitive, energy-intensive industries are not exploited in the near term by the Chinese and others in terms of them taking advantage of this increased cost.
"Right off the top, we cannot auction off all those credits.”
"The way it works around here is that you never get everything you want all at once," Phil Clapp once instructed me about the way things work in Washington. "You take as big a bite of the apple as you can, and you keep going back over and over. Solving global warming is going to take a generation or more of work."
It's the wise counsel needed for the present moment as the nation gets a first look at what its long-awaited climate law is likely going to look like. U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey today released a discussion draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 – a 648-page proposal that provides the blueprint from Democratic lawmakers.
Judging from the short summary that was issued with the bill and from selective dives into its detailed provisions, the bill attempts to execute a powerful long jump while carrying a sack of potatoes.
It's an apt metaphor for the hope and reality of American legislative democracy. The Act is a tremendous leap toward a clean energy future. It calls for renewable energy, modernization of the electrical grid, more electric vehicles and big increases in the efficiency of appliances and buildings. It gets bogged down by the political need to drag behind it a dirty fossil past using various compromises and concessions. It is a brilliantly centrist bill that moves forward while pulling in opposite directions – designed out-of-the-gate to attract the needed votes of heartland lawmakers. That's why the Right wants it destroyed and the Left wants it strengthened.
What illustrates this most poignantly is perhaps the most surprising inclusion, and to many among the most disappointing – a provision to strip EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey released a draft of their comprehensive climate legislation today – a 648-page proposal that plays to the political center, particularly the Midwest and coal state Democrats whose votes will be necessary for the legislation to pass.
The draft hits the president’s greenhouse gas reduction targets with cap-and-trade, sets a strong national renewable electricity standard, and proposes new energy efficiency requirements. At the same time, though, it allows for extensive industry offsets, and it could ultimately undermine the EPA.
In a conference call today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Markey reached out to environmental leaders and asked them to support the proposal.
The lukewarm embrace it received indicated that the centrist legislation hit its mark.
President Obama changed the tune in Washington when he ordered that all policymaking be based on sound science. But the shift from opinion- to fact-based decisionmaking still hasn’t transferred to Congress.
The problem is evident each time the House and Senate environment committees hold hearings on climate change.
In the interest of balance, the minority-party committee members have the power to invite witnesses to testify. And Republicans such as Sen. James Inhofe and Reps. Joe Barton and John Shimkus (see video) have ensured that climate change deniers without credentials in climate science testify alongside respected scientists.
The result is conflicting testimony that keeps the committee chairmen running interference as they try to clarify fact from fiction and leaves less-informed members of Congress bluntly asking: Who's lying?
Perhaps they should ask John Holdren, who was confirmed last week as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He's the president's chief science advisor, America's "scientist laureate." At a conference a few months ago, he spelled out how preposterous the views of climate change deniers are:
“Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by this vocal fringe should ask themselves how it could be, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that the leaderships of the national academies of sciences of every country in the world that has one are repeatedly on record saying that global climate change is real, dangerous, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early and concerted action to reduce those causes; that this is also the overwhelming consensus view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every major university in the world.”
“The fact is that anybody who could believe that the cream of the part of the world scientific community that has actually studied this phenomenon could be co-opted by hoaxers or suffering from mass hysteria is just not thinking clearly."
