| Two weeks ago, a deeply flawed ("counterfeit" even, as NASA's top climate scientist put it) energy bill passed the House. The lack of a strong progressive block in the House was disastrous. Almost no progressive members of Congress were willing to draw a line in the sand and vote no when the bill was weakened (Reps. Peter DeFazio, Pete Stark, and Dennis Kucinich were courageous exceptions). The result was a bill that did little to promote clean energy and failed to solve the climate crisis. While many special interests -- from Dirty Coal to Big Oil to Corporate Agribusiness to Wall Street -- were served, the public interest was not.
Because of the dire threat climate destabilization poses to our economy and quality of life, as well as global security and stability, we simply must do better than the House bill that puts a hard-to-change, ill-advised system in place. At a minimum, any bill the Senate passes should:
1. Maintain the EPA's existing authority to use the Clean Air Act to regulate coal-fired power plants, which the House-passed bill undermines. (Coal is the #1 source of global warming pollution in the world.)
2. Bring about a true transition to clean energy. One current Senate proposal (the bill that passed the Senate Energy Committee) would produce no more clean energy than business-as-usual scenarios. That's a disaster that must be fixed.
3. Prevent gaming by Wall Street. There's a reason Wall Street has 130 lobbyists working full time on climate change. Within years, the carbon trading system created by the House bill could become the biggest derivatives market in the world, subject to "subprime carbon" and speculation. This needs to be remedied.
4. Lay the groundwork for an international solution to global warming. A key phase of international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is slated to culminate in December in Copenhagen. The emissions reduction targets in the House-passed bill are so weak (and are further undermined by offset loopholes), and the bill's funding for international solutions is so meager, that the bill is incompatible with a fair, effective global agreement. Developing countries are rightly rejecting these proposals, which is why the G8 failed to agree on emissions reductions targets in Italy this week.
The only way we're going to get a better bill out of the Senate is if a progressive bloc of senators demands it, the same way 10-15 Democrats told Majority Leader Reid that without a public option in health care reform, they'd vote no. With action in the Environment and Public Works Committee delayed until after the August recess, that means progressive activists and organizations have time to press senators to take such a stand. Let's get to work!
By the way ... President Obama doesn't have to wait for Congress. His administration should stop dragging its feet and do more to use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to fight global warming. Doing so would reduce pollution and increase pressure on the Senate. More on this in a future post.
NOTE: I direct public advocacy at Friends of the Earth. For the next several months, we will be sponsoring OpenLeft. That means you'll see our button on the top right side of this page, and it also means we'll be involved in putting up front-page posts about once a week. I hope you find our contributions to be useful. We look forward to your comments. |
