Centrist Democratic senators have turned on President Obama, forming an alliance with conservative Republicans to remake climate change legislation into a Christmas tree for energy company lobbyists. The bill is so anti-climate that Republican Lindsey Graham called it a half-assed bill.
If the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that's moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.
Democrats Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln have built an alliance, the dirty dozen, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions, to remove carbon caps and to give away huge sudsidies to the coal, nuclear, oil and gas industries.
President Obama slammed this approach.
I don't want us to just say the easy way out is to just give a bunch of tax credits to clean energy companies. The market works best when it responds to price. And if they start seeing, you know what, that dirty energy is a little pricier, clean energy is a little cheaper, they'll innovate and they'll think things through in all kinds of ways.
Republican Lindsey Graham said that a price must be paid for carbon pollution to achieve energy independence.
"It's the 'kick the can down the road' approach," said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "It's putting off to another Congress what really needs to be done comprehensively. I don't think you'll ever have energy independence the way I want until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are interconnected."
The legislation would give massive subsidies for nuclear power while providing modest support for renewable energy. (I am not opposed to nuclear power as the Mother Jones article's author appears to be, but I don't support giving nuclear power favored subsidization over renewable power and conservation.)
The bill would also establish something called a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), which supporters claim will direct much-needed loans to the renewable energy sector. However, the bill's fine print ensures that the lion's share of the money will likely go not to start-up wind farms or solar panel factories, but to the nuclear industry. As Mother Jones has reported, the bill would empower the Department of Energy to hand out an unlimited number of loan guarantees to underwrite the construction of new nuclear plants without congressional review. This amounts to a massive giveaway to the nuclear industry, as construction costs have spiraled so dramatically over the past decade that the private sector now refuses to finance new plants. With the Congressional Budget Office warning that the chance of default on these loans is at least 50 percent, the energy bill could leave the taxpayer on the hook for billions.
The dirty dozen are attempting to greenwash their dirty energy bill.
Even though supporters of the energy bill like Byron Dorgan tout the proposal as a way to "move us in the direction of a lower-carbon future," the legislation was not written with the aim of lowering pollution. In fact, the bill's numerous concessions to big energy interests could actually lead to more, not less, emissions.
If signed into law, the measure would lift a ban on drilling for oil in the eastern Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida—allowing oil extraction just 45 miles offshore.
These Democrats so committed to supporting the fossil fuel industry that Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are acting as the moderates working with President Obama to get the votes for a climate bill that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
With a bloc of Democrats almost entirely written off, it seems Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman are left figuring out just how much oil, gas, nuclear, and coal are needed to sweeten the deal for Republicans. Graham remains confident that they can figure out the right mix. "If we can make the energy piece attractive enough for Republicans, there's going to be more than a handful that would agree to emissions controls," he said. The Obama administration seems to have adopted the same strategy: In the energy portion of his State of the Union address, Obama spoke only of initiatives to encourage nuclear, oil, gas, and "clean" coal—and barely mentioned renewable energy.
Senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman are negotiating with senators who want to pass a climate bill over an alternative to cap and trade called cap and dividend proposed by Senator Maria Cantwell.
Cap-and-dividend works by only limiting emissions by "upstream" industries—that is, the first sellers of fossil fuels, like oil refineries and coal mines. All pollution permits under the cap would be auctioned, and most of the revenues would be returned to energy consumers. As with cap-and-trade, the limit on emissions becomes stricter over time.
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Cantwell's bill requires all carbon trading to be done on exchanges, and would allow only polluters to participate in trading. (Cap and trade allows speculators to participate in its carbon market.) And where her measure requires 100 percent of pollution permits to be auctioned, Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey both distribute roughly 85 percent of those permits free of charge. Seventy-five percent of the revenues from the sale of the permits would then be refunded to consumers, in the form of a "carbon refund payment," to offset the increase in energy prices. The other 25 percent would go to a dedicated trust fund for job training programs, clean energy research and development, and climate mitigation and adaptation programs.
Lindsey Graham's leadership on the Kerry, Graham, Lieberman climate bill makes certain that concessions will be made to support increased nuclear power generation and more blocks leased for offshore oil drilling. Graham stated his legislative objectives on energy recently.
Most importantly, a green economy can lead to a renaissance in nuclear energy - a field in which South Carolina has the workforce and expertise to excel. To clean up our environment, we must reinvigorate nuclear energy - the largest source of carbon-free energy worldwide.
For more than three decades our nation has refused to build and operate new nuclear power plants. Several companies have already made it clear they would like to construct at least four new nuclear reactors in South Carolina (we have seven already).
Almost half of the electricity generated in our state comes from nuclear energy. Climate change legislation provides us the opportunity to include strong, pro-nuclear provisions that ensure these facilities, and more, are built and operational.
Finally, I believe climate change legislation should open additional regions to responsible offshore drilling. If our state consented to drilling off our shores beyond the horizon, South Carolina would share in the revenues. Every barrel we find here at home is one less we import from overseas. Let's turn "Drill Here Drill Now" from a slogan into reality.
Outside the beltway the loss of Arctic sea ice continues, inexorably.
While we have suffered through a cold January in the eastern U.S. after the warmest decade on record, the water dominated southern hemisphere broke the all time record for warmth.
The oceans have a much higher heat capacity than land, so the record warmth in the southern hemisphere is a significant milestone. It means that the earth's heat content continues to rise from previous highs.
Original source for this figure.
Citation: Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster, and T. Wong (2009), An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D17107, doi:10.1029/2009JD012105.