Are The Climate Change Bill's Details the Devil?

by: David Sirota
Fri May 22, 2009 at 15:51

There's a lot of celebratory hype surrounding the cap-and-trade bill moving through Congress right now. I'm not the world's biggest environmental policy expert, but I am increasingly concerned that we're not getting the real story, based both on conversations I've had with environmental activists and based on stuff like this from reputable progressive think tanks:

Waxman-Markey Climate Bill's Emissions "Cap" May Let U.S. Emissions Continue to Rise Through 2030

If fully utilized, the emissions "offset" provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security Act would allow continued business as usual growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions until 2030, leading one to wonder: where's the cap in the "cap" and trade?

At the heart of the nearly thousand page long climate change and clean energy bill being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives this week is a "cap and trade" mechanism aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

However, a provision in the bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454 or "ACES"), allows polluting firms in the U.S. to finance emissions reductions overseas in lieu of reducing their own global warming pollution and may allow American emissions to continue to rise for up to twenty years, according to new analysis from the Breakthrough Institute...

While the bill intends to reduce economy-wide U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% below historic 2005 levels by 2020, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050, the use of international offsets would allow U.S. emissions to continue at up to 1.5 billion tons higher than the emissions reduction path intended by the bill.

This comes just after Public Citizen, arguably the gold-standard watchdog group for progressives, told the Wall Street Journal that the supposedly amazing and awesome cap-and-trade bill is actually "very meek, very ineffective legislation" because President Obama has defied his own campaign promise by supporting a bill that "would give away more than two-thirds of the permits" for free.

To justify this, the White House is offering up the same tired, pathetic and demoralizing rationale for other capitulations: the politically "possible."

Despite a Democratic House and nearly 60 votes in the Democratic Senate, the president who told us to believe in transforming politics seems to be telling us that it's only "possible" to pass a climate bill that potentially does very little (just like he's telling us that it's only "possible" to pass a health care bill that doesn't even consider single-payer proposals that polls show the majority of the public supports). Indeed, a president who won an overwhelming victory in 2008 and whose party has complete control of Congress seems to believe he has to continue playing by the Same Old Rules that shoves out the "possible" canard as reason for half-measures.

Of course, that's not what the White House is officially saying. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The climate-change legislation may not be the bill candidate Obama envisioned, Mr. Emanuel said, but it's moving, and progress is "the one thing I hold over everything else."

Bill Clinton said it depends on what your definition of "is" is...well, I guess in response to Emanuel, we might ask what his definition of "progress" is.

Unfortunately, what I'm hearing out of D.C. is that the Permanent Democratic Establishment - many of the think tanks, legacy activist groups, media outlets, etc. - are going with the "this is all we can get, so let's back it" mentality that is, well, so utterly D.C. I mean, sure, we may not get a perfect climate bill - but the fact that there's resistance to exert major pressure at the get-go while the bill is only in its initial committee hearing process suggests the bill will get even worse from where it is now. Somehow, while the Right understands Negotiation 101 - ie. the principle of asking for everything, expecting to compromise down to what you ultimately want - much of the Professional Left still does not.



http://www.openleft.com/diary/13461/are-the-climate-change-bills-details-the-devil

for a serious cap and trade plan is delusional. They will be lucky to get 50.

This is an argument about how much worse climate change ought to be, in a context where nobody actually knows how bad it will be. In other words, it's all about politics now, and nothing in particular about preventing anything in the future.