Last weekend, I ran a two-part interview I did with Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). (Part 1 / Part 2) This week, PEER announced that the Obama EPA had ordered two EPA attorneys to take down a youtube video they had posted--"The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009"--criticizing the Obama-supported cap & trade approach to climate change as fatally flawed. PEER has reposted it for them. The two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are married to each other, and each has worked at EPA for over 20 years. In the video, Zabel, speaking for both of them, refers to their experience as EPA attorneys, but immediately states that they are not represeenting the EPA:
ALLAN ZABEL: Our opinions are based on more than twenty years each working as attorneys at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.
According to PEER:
The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31 .... On November 5, 2009, EPA ethics officials ordered the two veteran employees to -
"Remove your climate change video from You Tube by the close of business on Friday, November 6, 2009";
"Edit your You Tube video...by:
(i) Removing the language starting at 1:06 min - 'Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.'
(ii) Removing the images of EPA's building starting at 1:06 min...
(v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min - 'In my work at EPA, I've been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.'"
"All future requests for approval of an outside writing activity must be accompanied by a draft of the document that is the subject of the approval request..."
"EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who has re-posted the original video and its script. "EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay."
Here's the video, so you can judge for yourself (more about the incident, as well as the couple's argument, on the flip):
The New York State Senate and Assembly, too often a model of corruption and dysfunctionality, rose above petty politics last week to pass forward-thinking legislation on climate and energy, setting a precedent for bipartisanship and a sensible cap and trade system. The State Senate passed the groundbreaking Green Job/Green New York Act, with strong support from Republicans, Democrats, and the Working Families Party, which spearheaded the legislation. The bill -- expected to be signed into law this week by Gov. David Patterson leverages $112m in revenue from the Northeasts's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) into $5 billion of private investment to finance home weatherization, energy efficiency projects, and green jobs creation.
I was reading Paul Krugman's column the other day and was dismayed by his argument. According to the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, a half-ass, half-hearted measure on curbing carbon emissions is better than doing nothing, but I'm unconvinced. As written in The Washington Post:
On paper, the Waxman-Markey bill puts a cost on carbon dioxide by imposing a ceiling, or cap, on greenhouse gas emissions and then setting up a market for regulated industries -- such as the electric power sector -- to buy and sell allowances to pollute under that cap. As the cap is reduced each year, market participants will exchange allowances in a complex auction market.
If you liked what credit default swaps did to our economy, you're going to love cap-and-trade. Just read Title VIII of the bill, which lets investment banks, hedge funds and other speculators participate in the cap-and-trade market. They don't have emissions to cut; they have commissions to make.
The real hidden catch of the cap-and-trade system, though, is that it will require consumers to pay twice: first for emission allowances and then for the construction of new low- and zero-carbon power plants.
That doesn't sound very good, and the bad news gets progressively worse.
Contrary to assurances from the bill's sponsors that utility customers wouldn't have to pay these costs for the first decade, some coal-dependent utilities would be forced to purchase more than half of their allowances when the program is scheduled to begin in 2012. Would these allowances reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? No; that would come when consumers footed a second bill - for the cost of their utilities either to retrofit coal and gas plants to capture carbon - something that cannot be done today on a commercial scale - or to shut them down and build non-carbon-producing nuclear plants and wind farms instead.
There are basically two systems for managing carbon emissions. One is a carbon tax, in which you put a price on carbon. The other is called a cap and trade system, where you put an overall economy-wide cap in carbon emissions, issue carbon credits, and let groups trade the 'right to pollute'. Cap and trade is a 'market' based solution, and so it's the one being pushed by a broad range of industry groups and DC greens. It's also the favored approach of Barack Obama. Still, it's not looking likely to happen out of the gate.
David Roberts points to this quote from Senator Clair McCaskill on cap and trade legislation.
"I think a delay may be necessary," she continued. "Yes, we've got to do something. Yes, we have to move forward. But we can't kill the business climate at the same time. I'm from a state where most of the people who turn on the lights in the state get it from utility companies that depend on coal. And the cost of switching all that to clean coal technology or to alternative sources is going to be borne by them -- by regular folks who are trying to figure out how to pay their mortgages right now."
Meanwhile, the cap and trade system in Europe is a fiasco, since designing an emissions credit system from scratch, loopholes and all, is proving to be a boon for lobbyists and polluters while not doing so much for carbon emissions. An economic downturn should reduce carbon emissions on its own (China's exports are already dropping), and depending on infrastructure investment (like electrifying our auto fleet), that reduction could be sustained for some time.
Eventually, a carbon tax and a whole set of carbon-focused regulations should be part of our international currency regime, but I don't see this happening soon for a whole set of political reasons.
I'm excited that Environmental Defense is now saying publicly, in response to criticism from Matt Stoller and me, that it "has not endorsed" the Lieberman-Warner bill and that it "will work to strengthen the bill, particularly to achieve the deeper long-term emissions reductions scientists tell us we need to avoid a climate catastrophe."
That's great, but I must note it's a sentiment that was distinctly lacking from the statement ED put out in response to the bill, which mainly offered a passionate defense, or the fund-raising letter it sent out to activists (thanks Roger Smith for posting this). True, it did include one line that said, "This bill is a good start in that direction [of 80 percent emissions deductions], and we will continue to work in that direction." But the clear implication was that they would push for those commitments through some future legislative mechanism.
Environmental Defense continues to attack and undermine the excellent Energy Bill, which Bush has threatened to veto.
A cap and trade bill by Joe Lieberman and John Warner is set to be introduced tomorrow in the Senate. It's basically the biggest corporate giveaway in history. Here's Friends of the Earth:
The Friends of the Earth analysis found that the coal industry in particular stands to benefit from this legislation, precisely because it is currently the industry most responsible for global warming pollution. Depending on market conditions, the coal industry could receive permits worth up to $231 billion in the first year alone, 48 percent of the total permit allocation. It could then sell or "trade" its permits to others for their cash value, or it could emit at no cost carbon that less fortunate industries would have to pay to emit.
The Bush administration issued a pre-emptive veto threat on energy legislation late Monday, attaching a long list of demands that Democrats rejected out of hand.
Among the demands was a warning against raising taxes - effectively forbidding Democratic efforts to roll back billions in tax breaks for oil companies - and opposition to requiring power companies to increase the use of renewable electricity.
There's a huge temptation to 'do something' about global warming right now in Congress. The Energy Bill could be that 'something', but it's going to be vetoed unless all the good stuff is pulled out.
Warner-Lieberman is the next in the temptation queue. There's an interesting environmental split here, since Environmental Defense and other useful idiots to the wealthy are backing Lieberman-Warner while progressive groups like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club are not. It's tailor made for Lieberman, who gets to appear as if he's doing something on global warming while actually giving away more to corporate interests than the government has ever considered.
[Sorry to single you out Chris, but I'm attempting to refute a common thread in your recent posts, so you need to be singled out.]
I've been following with interest Chris's argument that the "big three" Democrats don't have different policies on various topics [http://www.openleft....], [http://www.openleft....]. He commonly uses the "cap and trade to cut carbon by 80% by 2050" example in this context. However, I would like to point out a few differences between the plans, which indicate that they aren't as similar as the one-sentence excerpts indicate.
Joe Lieberman is writing the Senate global warming cap-and-trade bill with Sen. Boxer's stamp of approval. The proposed bill is a straightforward piece of polluter welfare. In addition to various coal industry subsidies, the bill gives away nearly all of the emissions credits that would be traded under the cap-and-trade scheme.
According to the the Politico, at today's PPI/DLC forum Joe Lieberman said he and John Warner are open to changing their bill from a proposed 76% give-away of pollution credits to 100% auction, following the polluter pays principle:
We've heard [calls for a 100 percent auction] from some stakeholders and heard that from some of our members. We're thinking about it. Warner and I haven't closed our minds to that. It's on the table.
Lieberman almost definitely will be unveiling the bill next week. Now's the time to pressure your Senators and the environmental groups to take a stand for 100% auction.
Scott Paul at the Washington Note reports something that I heard about a month ago from a Bush administration insider. The Bush adminstration is going to stop denying global warming and is preparing to regulate the economy.
For starters, the White House official said - to the surprise of perhaps everyone in the room - that the administration is not opposed to a domestic cap & trade regime. I'm still having trouble swallowing this, but the official maintains that the administration has always been open to considering a proposal that doesn't involve international carbon markets. I'll believe it when I see it.
That's a really really big deal. Now, let's be real, the Bush administration is not interested in dealing with global warming. They don't change their minds on an issue like this without a really good political reason. And that reason is pretty simple - being able to regulate the economy with the ostensible purpose of reducing carbon creates the ability to hand out tens of billions of dollars to carbon emitting industries. Yes, it's Healthy Forests and no Child Left Behind all over again, only this time we're dealing with global warming.
This time it's going to be called 'Cap and Trade', which I've blogged about before. A Cap and Trade system means the government creates a system to distribute carbon credits, or the right to emit carbon, and gives them to industry to trade or use. By gradually lowering the carbon cap, carbon emissions are ostensibly reduced. That's the theory, anyway. Economist Rob Shapiro tears the system apart in this very readable paper which points out that an economy-wide cap and trade is rife with cheating and gives money precisely to the industries who are doing the emitting. That's why Bush is shifting on carbon regulation.
Anyway, the bill he's going to get behind is the Lieberman-Warner bill, opposed by the Sierra Club but supported by the intensely corporate-friendly and compromised Environmental Defense. There's a green civil war coming, with ED President Fred Krupp playing the role of the DLC. The other environmental groups are split, with the Pew Center and the Nature Conservancy following Krupp over the cliff. The Union of Concerned Scientists and NRDC are 'concerned', and the LCV and the Sierra Club are clear that this is a bad move. If you want to see a dysfunctional, degraded, and compromised movement that have lost touch with their mission statements, look no further than ED, Pew, and the Nature Conservancy.
The one other very significant statement Paul quotes is that the Bush administration is strongly opposed to international carbon markets. That's a hint that this legislation is not meant to address carbon. Carbon is not like other pollutants. If you emit it anywhere on the planet is has the same effect. By refusing to make this a global market, all the Bush administration is trying to do is raise the costs of emitting carbon in America while keeping the costs lower in other countries. That has the effect of accelerating out-sourcing of jobs, reducing the leverage of labor, and increasing the leverage of international business elites. One thing is does not do is reduce carbon emissions, since a factory here can be moved to China quite easily at this point if there's a carbon price differential.
All in all, it's a terrible legislative package coming to the floor in the fall. We need to be prepared to beat this back viciously. We get one bite at this apple.
Hello Open Left and I'm excited to be a part of things on Opening Day.
One of the things Matt and Chris have always supported is the network of state blogospheres. We have seen their willingness to highlight issues happening in the states and connect them to the broader progressive movement. I believe there is just such an issue building in California that requires a far wider distribution. I have been writing about it extensively at Calitics and wanted to bring it to everyone's attention here today.
The progressive movement in California is, in a word, moribund, at least at the political level. Sacramento is dominated by lobbyists (9 for every legislator), and a Democratic legislature that is perpetually on bended knee to either special interests or a supposedly "post-partisan" governor. It took a brazen act such as what Governor Schwarzenegger has attempted in the past couple weeks to shake the state political class out of its stupor, and understand the need to challenge and stand up for progressive principles and values. But the megaphone for politics in general is so quiet in California, that IMO, only issues which play national can actually penetrate the state. So I need to project this wider.
