The climate peacocks are a group of Senators who preen, strut, and profess great concern about the climate. "Like "deficit peacocks" who pretend to be hawkish on budgets but refuse any real solution, these "climate peacocks" claim to care about science, energy reform, and the environment, but have yet to find solutions to the threat of climate change." They're so concerned that they dare not let the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon, because Congress has to do the job. And they're so concerned that a carbon regulation bill won't be fair to their states that Congress had better not regulate carbon.
Senator Jeff Bingaman doesn't preen or strut. He's supposed to be a slow, careful, and methodical pragmatist. However, the energy bill he's been crafting has all the tailfeathers of a climate peacock. Leaked draft below the fold.
The Washington Independent has an emailed preview of what to expect in the Senate's energy bill. Surprise! It looks a lot like Bingaman's American Clean Energy Leadership Act, S.1462 aka the horrible, make-emissions-worse-than-doing-nothing, allegedly clean-energy-only bill. "'A large portion' of the bill will be pulled from the legislation authored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), which was approved by the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee last summer," reports the Independent. The ACELA-like provisions will be merged with a spill bill, i.e., bill regulating offshore drilling.
Conspicuous only by its absence from Bingaman's draft bill is any mention of a carbon cap or price on carbon.
Separately, Bingaman opines in Politico that Congress must act to reduce carbon emissions. He starts off saying all the right things:
Over the past 12 months, seminal reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the International Energy Agency have framed the issues and constraints that Congress needs to address.
In the congressionally mandated report on "America’s Climate Choices," published in May, the National Academies outlined the following seven "core strategies" for U.S. action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:
• Adopt a mechanism for setting an economywide carbon pricing system....
That economy-wide carbon pricing system is nowhere in ACELA. His bill apparently won't even take the half-step of a utility-only carbon pricing system (pricing carbon emitted from electric utilities that use coal). Instead, Bingaman writes:
One important step — that we may not now have the political consensus in Congress to take — is the first core strategy outlined by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering: setting an economywide carbon pricing system.
Again, his draft bill doesn't contain any such creature. According to the Washington Independent, Bingaman has said he is developing such a utility-only proposal, "though he has reserved the right not to introduce the bill if there is not enough support for it." In other words, the utility-only bill may be a separate orphan bill, not tied to the politically popular spill bill and thus easy to vote down if it even materializes.
By contrast, Senators Kerry and Lieberman aren't giving up on a carbon cap -- they're making a last-ditch effort for a utility-only climate bill. And the White House, through Carol Browner, is taking the initiative on clean energy by supporting a cap on carbon:
The president believes that the best way to accomplish this goal is to pass comprehensive energy and climate change legislation that puts a cap on harmful carbon pollution.
Bingaman, on the other hand, is allying himself with the Climate Peacocks -- senators who are so deeply concerned about climate that they'll do anything short of actually doing something about it.
Whip count tracking here