Climate Politics

Washington's cap-and-trade legislation passes out of committee

Dear pollutey companies of Washington state, your days are numbered. House Bill 1819, backed by Gov. Chris Gregoire (D), has whizzed through committee and is on its way to a full vote.

The bill sets up a cap-and-trade system that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions and require companies to purchase the right to pollute further, while greener biz folk would profit by auctioning off their unused allowances. Hooray for rewarding the good guys!

The carbon trading market would extend to six other states and four Canadian provinces -- all part of the Western Climate Initiative -- once the bill is passed here and in the other jurisdictions.

Bush's former ag deputy slinks back from whence he came: a cush agribiz post

A few years back, I thought I was on to a Really Big Story: President Bush had plucked a man named Chuck Conner from his perch as president of the Corn Refiners Association -- a front group for Archer Daniels Midland, and the force behind those putrid high-fructose corn syrup ads -- and made him his "special assistant to the president for agriculture, trade and food assistance." Eventually, Conner became the USDA's deputy secretary -- widely seen as the agency's fixer, the guy who got things done.

In the corn bubble in which I then existed -- some say I'm still there -- this seemed like a really big deal. A man who had essentially worked as a lobbyist for Archer Daniels Midland -- the company that singlehandely rigged up both the corn ethanol program and the high-fructose corn syrup market, two massive travesties -- was now advising the president on ag policy.

And people ... yawned. Thinking back on it, of course they did. This was the Bush administration -- crony capitalism had been raised to the level of statecraft. These guys were handing billion-dollar no-bid contracts to the vice president's old company, to perform outsourcing functions in a war he himself had engineered. What was a bit of Oval Office bump-and-tickle with an industrial corn man?

Well, for those of you who care, here's a newsflash: Conner waltzed out of Bush's USDA and into another top job at a big agribiz trade group: the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. Now, the group's name makes it sound a bit down-home, like a bunch of guys in overalls banding together to run a grain elevator.

Don't be fooled. The NCFC is made up mainly of "cooperatives" that have scaled up to corporate size; many of them work in concert with agribiz giants like ADM to squeeze small farmers and workers. One glaring example is the giant entity Dairy Farmers of America, an NCFC member that controls a third of the milk produced in the U.S. DFA has been accused of colluding with milk-processing giant Dean Foods to squeeze farmers on price.

The game plan: partnership with China

Conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama needs to secure a domestic climate bill and then take that bill to international climate talks in Copenhagen this December as a demonstration of good faith. I very, very much doubt there will be a climate bill signed into law by Dec. But there’s something else that the […]

Anti-coal activists get a boost from Tennessee ash spill and other mishaps

Anti-coal activists are inspired to hit the streets. Sarah McCoin watched for years as coal fly ash piled up at the coal-fired power plant just a mile down the road from her house in Harriman, Tenn. “We’d question, ‘I wonder how high they’re going to build that thing? I wonder what they’re going to do […]

Obama, Harper fired up to make dirty energy clean

President Obama ventured north to Canada on Thursday to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but environmentalists looking for any indication that the two leaders would issue unequivocal calls for action on global warming or a curtailing of America’s dependence on Canada’s vast oil deposits were left disappointed. The two leaders, instead, promised a “clean […]

Blue dogs, old tricks

Let me highly recommend Chris Hayes' piece on Blue Dog Democrats. This is the coalition of House Democrats who have decided that "fiscal responsibility" is the highest virtue, where fiscal responsibility means preventing the government from spending more on anything but the military. (Military spending is fine -- there was zero Blue Dog opposition to the war or to the perpetually increasing military budget.) In particular, it's worth highlighting this key sentence:

"Where Blue Dogs have perhaps been most effective is in helping Republicans pass legislation and blocking or diluting progressive legislation."

Yes. You will hear lots more from and about the Blue Dogs when energy and climate legislation are debated later this year. The Blue Dogs will push to weaken the legislation and reduce the amount of investment in the green economy, not for any particularly coherent philosophical or substantive reason, but just because it gets them lots of corporate donations and media attention. As Ezra says:

The Blue Dogs smartly hew to a form of elite centrism that assures them almost uniquely glowing press coverage. ...

Put another way: It doesn't matter if you're a centrist or a liberal. It only matters whether you're perceived as a centrist or a liberal. And Blue Dogs have chosen to be ostentatiously and inconsistently heterodox on the issue that's most visible to the perception-makers.

Preserving the status quo by preventing investment in alternatives is "centrist," even when the status quo is leading the country to ruin. It's all atmospherics, but the consequences for the atmosphere will be very real.

Memo to tax sirens: Both a carbon cap and a tax can be implemented well

This is a guest post from David Hawkins, director of the climate program at NRDC.

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In the Odyssey, Odysseus had to be tied to the mast to resist the call of the Sirens, who tried to lure his ship onto the rocks.  These days the siren song of a carbon tax fills the ear of many commentators who urge us to recognize its beauty and steer our ship in its direction.  A Washington Post editorial is a recent example.

The premise of the Post editorial is that cap-and-trade regimes are complex and vulnerable to special pleading, and they do not guarantee success in reducing emissions, while a tax is simple and sure in its effects. But this is grass-is-greener thinking. The Post compares a flawed version of one approach (cap-and-trade) to an idealized version of the other (tax) and not surprisingly, the idealized approach wins.

The fallacy in this argument is that the same political body (our Congress) that, we are assured, will insist on putting special interest features into a cap-and-trade bill, but when presented with a tax approach, will vote only for the purest proposal, firmly rejecting all lobbyists' pleas. Those who argue that a tax approach is less likely to be designed for special interests than a cap approach simply are ignoring the tax code. We have decades of empirical evidence in the U.S. that when Congress designs tax policies it rarely resists the entreaties of special interests.

It is worth reading the history of recent (Nixon onward) energy tax proposals done by the group Tax Analysts. It is hard to see anything in that history that suggests a carbon tax would be successful (or if something called a carbon tax were enacted that it would actually accomplish anything).

The fate of the 1993 BTU tax proposal by Bill Clinton is instructive.

NYT breaks story on CO2 regulations … after two years of Grist coverage

Back in mid-January, Kate covered Lisa Jackson's confirmation hearing, in which Jackson promised to move ahead on the CO2 endangerment finding:

On climate change, Jackson said she would have the EPA declare whether greenhouse gases pose a danger to humankind and need to be regulated -- an action mandated by the Supreme Court, but put off by the Bush administration. "When that finding happens, when EPA makes a decision on endangerment, let me put it that way, it will indeed trigger the beginnings of regulation of CO2 for this country," she said.

Then, this past Tuesday, Kate covered the fact that Jackson announced the beginning of the endangerment finding process.

Back in December, I posted some thoughts on regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act.

At the beginning of February, the folks from the Constitutional Accountability Center wrote two excellent posts (here and here) on the politics and mechanics of regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act.

Our own Sean Casten has published at least two interesting posts (here and here) on the technical and legal challenges of regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act.

And on Tuesday, I posted an extensive analysis of the politics and mechanics of regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act.

Meanwhile, today, The New York Times finally got around to covering the story.

And lo! The blogs are suddenly abuzz with the news! Friends are emailing me the article! "Did you know about this?!" Our own commenters are saying "This will be the top story here on Grist tomorrow."

Yeeeeaaaaaaaargh!

What does the stimulus fight portend for the climate/energy fight?

The battle over the stimulus bill was the first big challenge of the Obama presidency, and the way it played out is instructive. What will it mean for the coming climate/energy fights?

First, let's get clear on the basic shape of what happened. Obama went into this thinking that an enormous financial crisis and a wide consensus among economists that large federal stimulus is required would be an opportunity to establish an early spirit of pragmatic "post-partisanship." If not in the face of a huge crisis, if not around an indisputably necessary bill, then when?

This is what Obama campaigned on and what he led with in office. He had dinner with conservative pundits. He had extended policy discussions with Congressional Republicans at the White House. He included a far greater percentage of tax cuts in his initial proposal than anyone expected (or most economists recommended). He worked with Congressional Dems to remove some of the small programs Republicans complained about (like re-sodding the National Mall). He did more reaching out, listening, and conceding to the opposing party than Republicans have, cumulatively, in the last 15 years, despite entering office fresh off of huge victories and sky-high public approval.

What did it get him? In terms of Republican support: zilch. Nothing. In the end he got zero votes in the House and all of three in the Senate, after several hundred thousands jobs had been stripped from the package. Republicans carpeted the media demagoguing individual spending programs from the bill and claiming Obama's bipartisanship had "failed" because, well, because they refused to participate. Karl Rove has announced, basically, that Republicans triumphed by giving Obama nothing and that they would not offer him a shred of credit no matter what happens to the economy. The GOP House minority whip says explicitly that he's modeling his leadership on Newt Gingrich. Seriously.

MoveOn preps for gigantic green economy campaign

This hit my inbox yesterday:

When FDR became president, a group of progressive activists asked him to push for some really big changes. His response? "I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it."

President Obama gets that we need to transform our economy. He's passionate about creating millions of green jobs and investing billions in renewable energy. And he's appointed great leaders like Energy Secretary Chu to help him.

But unless we create a massive green-economy movement across America, Obama won't have the mandate he needs to overcome the oil companies and make fundamental change. As president, Obama's extraordinary power comes from the people outside Washington. And that's us.

So we've worked up a big plan to build a green-economy groundswell. It'll mean tripling our field organizing team, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of MoveOn members to take local action, and running ads targeting powerful interests that stand in the way. It'll be MoveOn's biggest long-term campaign ever.

If President Obama is going to transform our economy, he needs all of us standing behind him giving him strength. Are you in?

I'm in!

(But, just to be picky, it's overcoming coal companies that will be the biggest challenge ...)