legislation

Eric Pooley offers nine questions on climate legislation that the press ought to ask Obama

Eric Pooley continues his quest to single-handedly raise the intelligence of mainstream media climate coverage by a factor of ten: Thursday on the Nieman Watchdog site, he lays out "nine climate questions for President Obama" on the upcoming climate bill. I won't attempt to summarize them here. Suffice to say, a) he hits the most important issues, and b) the chances of anyone in the U.S. political press corps asking Obama questions this informed and nuanced are somewhere between slim and nil.

I was going to conclude this post by cleverly pointing out an important question Pooley missed, but I can't think of one. Go read.

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.

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.

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.

Politicos, Pickens hype summit in D.C. next week

Three of the political leaders who will help determine the future of U.S. energy policy — and two guys who clearly want to influence it — spoke to reporters Wednesday in advance of a major energy summit in Washington, D.C., next week where each will speak. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Secretary of Energy […]

Expanding on Barbara Boxer's principles for climate legislation

This post is by Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced earlier this month that she hopes to have a cap-and-trade bill blessed by her committee by the end of the year. Her announcement left room for criticism.

Action advocates wished Boxer had been more specific about goals for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. The Wall Street Journal posted a piece suggesting the Senator's new principles were vague and stale.

Moreover, if we want Uncle Sam to wow the world with new-found religion on climate action and to do so in time for the U.S. to take its seat at Copenhagen in a morally upright position, then a committee vote by year's end will be too little too late. A better goal would be affirmative votes by the House and Senate well before Copenhagen, along with aggressive, progressive energy legislation and continuing bold action by the Obama Administration this spring and summer.

Still, if we want principled action, then principles are a good place to start. Boxer's are as follows:

Markey on cap v. tax and ways to properly regulate carbon markets

In Houston last week for CERAWeek, Rep. Ed Markey -- chair of the Energy/Environment Subcommittee and the Global Warming & Energy Independence Select Committee -- gave an interview to the Houston Chronicle.

He had this to say on the tax vs. trade question:

Q: A cap-and-trade system is widely assumed to be the form the climate change bill will take, but economists and many others say a carbon tax would be a simpler, more efficient method to reach the same goals. Is the door completely closed on a carbon tax?

A: I think it's much more likely that a cap-and-trade system will be used. They've already reached a consensus in Europe, that 400-million-person continent, that that's the way to go, and it's the overwhelming way we're going with. I understand economists, and how they want to have a debate over what's more efficient, but in the end we can construct it as a cap-and-invest bill that is imposed in a fair, predictable way and will create incentives for innovation. What I use as an analogy is the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Up until then not one single home had broadband access. My goal in that act was to create the incentives for the deployment of broadband that could then lead—because of that huge additional capacity that was constructed—to the creation of thousands of other companies that could use that broadband capacity. I didn't know the names of the companies would be Google, eBay, Amazon, YouTube and thousands of others that created 3 to 5 million new jobs in America. But 10 years later people look back at the black rotary phone era as ancient history, but it's not that long ago. And I think we can do that same thing here. We have the opportunity to create 3 to 5 million new jobs in the energy sector if we unleash a technological revolution, because we have created through a cap-and-trade system a set of incentives that provides that opportunity. And I'm very confident that the same thing will happen. That's been my experience as chairman over telecommunications, chairman over regulation of the financial marketplace: the incentives have to be put in place in a predictable way that creates the incentives for the change that the country needs.

As to the fear of financial speculators, he had this to say:

Money for fossil fuel research in the stimulus could still go to coal

Preliminary analysis of the stimulus deal from Congress available yesterday indicated that funding for “clean coal” had been cut from the package altogether. But it appears that funding in the bill could still go to carbon capture and sequestration projects through the package, which the House approved Friday afternoon. The summary of the bill [PDF] […]

The game plan: The mother of all energy bills

(hat tip to Joe Romm for the title) The next big green priority after stimulus will be energy. It is possible that some of what I describe below will be broken out into separate bills — for instance, Markey and Platts in the House and Bingaman in the Senate have put forward freestanding Renewable Energy […]