legislation

Ten reasons NYC’s congestion pricing plan went belly up

Albany strikes again: congestion pricing -- the smartest urban-transportation idea since the subway -- has been buried by the professional morticians of the New York State legislature, led by Chief Ghoul Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

As previously reported, the pricing plan, proposed a year ago by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and subsequently improved by a 17-member state-mandated commission, would have charged an $8 entry fee on cars driven into Manhattan's central business district (CBD) during 6 a.m. - 6 p.m. on weekdays. Benefits included an annual $500 million revenue stream for mass transit (sufficient to bond at least $5 billion in capital improvements), a solid if unspectacular drop in traffic gridlock and pollution, and, perhaps most significantly, a first step toward knocking the automobile off its privileged perch atop the New York street pyramid. Not to mention establishing the principle that safeguarding "the commons" -- our air, water and public space -- requires that we exact from ourselves a commensurate price for uses that damage or deplete it.

Congestion pricing was backed by an unusually broad coalition of labor, business, enviros (the full spectrum from EJ to Big Green) and civic associations. Yet neither this broad-spectrum support nor the plan's extraordinary vetting over the past 12 months deterred legislators from both parties from citing "unanswered questions" and assailing bogus inequities.

Calling today "a sad day for New Yorkers and New York City" and noting federal support for congestion pricing, Mayor Bloomberg blasted the legislature, stating that, "Even Washington, which most Americans agree is completely dysfunctional, is more willing to try new approaches to longstanding problems than our elected officials in the State Assembly."

With so much going for it, what killed the plan? There will be time later for sober postmortems, but for now, here's my shoot-from-the-hip Top 10 list of what felled congestion pricing in NYC:

Kansas coal bill redux

Once again the Kansas legislature has passed a bill pushing for coal plants, and once again Kansas Gov. Sebelius has vowed to veto it. Kansans should be proud. That’s quite an ass-kicker they elected!

New York City’s congestion pricing plan …

… is dead.

MLKJr.’s words about Vietnam apply to Iraq and the environment

Forty years ago, writes the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, liberalism's moments seemed to have passed:

From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps, and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.

I'm struck by the fact that another great burst of liberal legislation took place almost exactly 100 years prior, during the Civil War, when the reactionary Southerners were not in Congress: the Land-Reform colleges were set up, the Homestead Act was passed, giving millions of farmers access to farms and economic powers, and the first intercontinental railroads were built.

King Coal’s year of rejection by banks, judges, and a lot of other folks

Earth Policy Institute just released this revelatory chronology of really sad, horrible, and depressing events in the life of the coal industry since February 2007. What's next -- will Santa be switching to lumps of dirt?

Feb. 26, 2007: James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading climate scientist, calls for a moratorium on the construction of coal-fired power plants that do not sequester carbon, saying that it makes no sense to build these plants when we will have to "bulldoze" them in a few years.

Feb. 26, 2007: Under mounting pressure from environmental groups, TXU Corporation, a Dallas-based energy company, abandons plans for eight of 11 proposed coal-fired power plants, catalyzing the shift from coal-based to renewable energy development in Texas.

April 2, 2007: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and that EPA's current rationale for not regulating this gas is inadequate.

May 3, 2007: Washington Governor Christine Gregoire signs a bill that prevents new power plants from exceeding 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity generated, creating a de facto moratorium on building new coal-fired power plants in the state.

CAP article says it promotes the transition to clean energy

A new article by the Center for American Progress makes clear that the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act [PDF], S. 2191, would be a boon to affordable, job-creating renewable energy. The article, by CAP's Daniel J. Weiss and Alexandra Kougentakis, explains how the bill would ...

... make significant reductions in the carbon dioxide pollution that causes global warming as well as turbo charge investments in clean energy technologies such as wind, solar, and geothermal. It would provide direct assistance for renewable energy, as well as create economic incentives for utilities to invest in clean, carbon-free energy technologies instead of continued reliance on dirty fossil fuels. The boost for renewable energy would create thousands of new jobs in the clean energy industry.

The article also points out this:

The EPA just released a study that found that the bill's global warming pollution reductions would have almost no effect on long-term economic growth, and only a small effect on electricity prices and jobs. The same claims that opponents are making now were made about the acid rain control program 20 years ago -- claims that were all proven wrong.

The CAP article discusses the bill at length and how it would affect renewable energy and job creation in this country. It is well worth reading.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Joe Barton: Pork lover

Joe Barton (R-Texas) spoke to the U.S. Energy Association yesterday and made it clear ($ub req'd) that he's going to do everything he can to block cap-and-trade legislation from coming out of Congress:

As the Democrats move to pass climate change legislation this year, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, will be there to fight them, he told the U.S. Energy Assn's annual membership meeting yesterday.

As a senior member of the House Energy Committee, that's not a threat to be taken lightly. So why is he opposed?

As justification, he cites both his passion for economic stewardship and his scientific judgment:

Eager municipalities hopping on board

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s officially the Year of Green Building. And while some areas have had eco-standards in place for a while now (helloooooo, D.C.!), the fevah is spreading in cities across the U.S. Take a gander at a few places considering formal green-building guidelines this spring: In a move described as a […]

Notable quotable

“I think it’s a mistake to think that emission trading alone will be helpful in reducing greenhouse emissions to any serious extent. I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate from the tremendous success of SO2 and NOx to greenhouse gases. And I think the policy debate inside the Beltway is based on a superficial understanding […]