Dear Congressman Markey:
I am writing to ask your assistance to help me understand a statement you made at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on August 6 concerning the effect of the Waxman-Markey (ACESA) bill.
You responded to a question about the adequacy of the bill’s 1% emissions cap below 1990 by 2020 in view of the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC)’s call for a 25 to 40 % reduction, which aims for a 450 PPM stabilization concentration of CO2. Given that the IPCC report acknowledges only about a "50-50 chance that we can avoid a 2 degrees warming, which is catastrophic climate change" at that concentration, you said, in part, the following:
The science is quite clear, I agree with you...
and Henry Waxman and I in conjunction with the Speaker, we’ve set the strongest possible goals we could for our country, It’s highly ambitious, with great resistance from many industries in our country, but if we can get it on the books, like the 1990 Clean Air Act, that was the acid rain problem. It turned out that the cost of compliance with that law was 80 to 90 % less than all of the experts projected because of the technological revolution that is unleashed in order to solve the problem. I think the same thing is going to happen here, as happened in the Clean Air Act, as happened in the TeleComm Act, and if we get to it as quickly as possible, the genius here, of Harvard and MIT and CalTech and Stanford will finally have marketplace applications for what is already there in basic research, and we will solve the problem.
I would very like to believe that you are correct, because the quality and perhaps the length of my grandson’s life may depend on it, but if "solving the problem" means achieving a 25 to 40 % reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, I find it difficult to see how the cap and trade system called for in the bill can bring this about. Please understand that I am a concerned citizen and not an environmental expert. I admit that I have not read the bill, so I am hopeful that you can correct my interpretation of how the system would work.
Here is my concern. It seems to me that the "cap" will also create a kind of "floor" below which CO2 emissions are unlikely to fall by very much. Won’t the trading system virtually guarantee that carbon allowances not used by one entity will be put on the market and sold to another entity that will use them? Where is the incentive in the system to leave unused allowances "on the table"?
If this understanding is correct, then the cap would also establish a floor, albeit a soft one, for U.S. greenhouse emissions well above the level that the IPCC, and you yourself, understand will be necessary to avoid a climate catastrophe with any degree of certainty.
In your response to the questioner, you cited the success the cap and trade system for sulfur emissions established by the Clean Air Act of 1990 as a reason for your confidence that the cap and trade system in the Waxman-Markey bill will lead to a solution for the current climate emergency. My reading of the history of the 1990 act is that the costs of compliance with the cap did in fact prove to be much lower than had been anticipated, but costs are not the only or indeed the main concern now. According to climate scientists, our primary concern must be the amount of emissions in the next few years. Is there some plausible mechanism by which reductions in the costs of lowering carbon emissions that you anticipate will bring this about far more rapid reductions than implied by the cap?
In this connection, it would be reassuring to know if the acid rain reduction trading system under the Clean Air Act of 1990 actually resulted in substantially greater (100% or more) reductions than required by the emission cap, as would now be needed to get into the range called for by the IPCC.
I would welcome any information you can provide to help me understand your response at the Kennedy forum and reassure me that the U.S. will do what will be required to meet the climate emergency.
Respectfully,
Neighbor2
(Please rec this up if you think this question is an important one and deserves an answer.)