Today, Kerry and Lieberman will be unveiling their climate legislation. Even watered down, this is a big f'ing deal.
Please treat the eKos Earthship Wednesday as your climate bill open thread. The eKos Rangers will keep this diary updated with the latest news.
Here is the official release with info on the press conference. It will begin today at 1:30 PM EDT. We'll link to the live feed when it begins.
Update: I couldn't find a live feed to the press conference, but here is Kerry in an interview:
Update: Be sure to check out EcoAdvocates Tonight! Via PDNC:
EcoAdvocates has an exciting issue tonight about how citizens can get the upper hand on BP and its underwater oil volcano.
Hope you will join us at 5 pm pacific. :)
And Macca's Meatless Mondays! Via beach babe in fl:
will try to publish Meatless Monday tonight @ 6
writing a new diary hope I can finish it. Who needs family, work and life, right?
"Oil bla di, Oil Bla da"
Via Reuters/Yahoo:
There is no guarantee the bill will even be debated this year and it is unclear whether a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will hamper the legislation or prompt a more urgent look at U.S. energy and environmental policy.
A summary of the long-delayed bill, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, contained few surprises as many details had leaked out over the past several weeks.
As expected, the bill has some giveaways and isn't nearly strong enough to seriously address climate change:
At the core of the bill is a goal to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020. But the summary did not address several questions, such as how new pollution permits would be distributed or sold to electric power utilities.
The bill also contains tax and loan guarantee incentives to expand nuclear power generation. Offshore oil drilling also would get a new boost from Washington.
Both steps are aimed at building more support from senators than a climate-only bill would get.
But in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April, the proposal includes protections for coastal states that do not want oil drilling off their shores.
Reactions from Kossacks:
Last night, Meteor Blades posted a link to a leaked draft of the bill, along with this four page summary. He also posted a reaction by Joe Romm at Climate progress:
So does it meet the criteria in "What to look for in the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill"? That would require that the bill help ensure that by the 2020s that we have
• substantially dropped below the business-as-usual emissions path
• started every major business planning for much deeper reductions
• goosed the cleantech venture and financing community
• put in place the entire framework for U.S. climate regulations
• accelerated many tens of gigawatts of different types of low-carbon energy into the marketplace
• put billions into developing advanced low-carbon technology
• started building out the smart, green grid of the 21st century
• trained and created millions of clean energy jobs
• negotiated a working international climate regime
• brought China into the process
Yes, I think it does.
There really is no Plan B. Certainly leaving this to the EPA and a few states won’t achieve most of those, especially the crucial international deal.
Sadly, the conventional wisdom is that even this moderate bill has no chance — and I certainly think it doesn’t have very much chance if Obama doesn’t start pushing for it as hard as he pushed for healthcare.
RLMiller has an initial (and unofficial) reaction to some 'compromises' in the bill:
Among other parts, it changes Obama's planned expansion of offshore oil drilling as follows:
-- 37.5% of money raised from sale of leases is to be given to states, and 12.5% goes into the Land & Water Conservation Fund, in a provision known as revenue sharing;
-- a state may ban offshore oil drilling within 75 miles of its shoreline;
-- "Requires the Secretary of the Interior to study" environmental and economic impacts from potential oil spills in any newly opened up area.
Got that? Were you sitting down? States that are worried can ask for studies! Because studies solve everything!
But wait! It gets better! The outline also states that based on outcome of study, "directly affected states may prevent leasing from occurring." The Post's Post Carbon blog headlines New Drilling Protections:
It requires an Interior Department study to determine which states could be economically and environmentally affected by a spill. Those affected states would then be able to veto drilling by passing a law.
In other words, if leasing off Virginia's coast directly affects Maryland, Maryland might be able to prevent leases from going forward. So far, so good...until you think about what would happen if oil spilled in the Arctic, in "a region of turbulent waters, heavy fog and shifting ice hundreds of miles from deep-water ports," where the "nearest Coast Guard base is nearly 1,000 miles away." I'm a California native nowhere near the Chukchi Sea, but I'm very fond of Alaskan salmon and polar bears. Does that make California directly affected by drilling in "a remote region where cleanup crews may be hampered by bone-chilling cold, 24-hour-a-day darkness, 20-foot waves, clouds too low to launch aircraft and waters too shallow to bring in large ships"? Gee, Senator Lieberman, can you say "regional factionalism"? No? How about dumb idea?
A Siegel has a detailed initial reaction to the leaked draft. I highly recommend reading the whole article:
By my nature, I hover between being a pessimistic optimist (seeing reason for hope while uncertain about prospects for it being achieved) and being an optimistic pessimist (seeing very real reasons for terror and concern while hoping that I turn out to be wrong). Reading through the just released material, I seem to have been allowed the optimist side to have too much influence in recent times, somehow subconsciously thinking that Senator John Kerry knew better and that he wouldn’t sign his name to a disastrous bill. Sigh ... perhaps if I’d balanced that subconscious optimism with more open pessimism, the items in these released documents would be so disappointing.
Let me be clear, there are positive elements. The America Power Act will put in a carbon price, a ‘cap with a collar’:
Introductory floor and ceiling prices are set at $12 (increasing at 3 percent over inflation annually) and $25 (increasing at 5 percent over inflation annually), respectively.
While this pricing is far below any reasonable definition of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) emissions (and the $12 figure is roughly 1/8th of where reasonable analysis might put us), the creation of a floor price is critical. If, as I and so many clean-energy advocates suspect (understand ...), cutting emissions will turn out to be very inexpensive for the initial period (decade plus) of any climate mitigation effort, that minimum price will help accelerate clean-energy action beyond what would occur without the minimum price. (Small fiscal incentives can help spark major change. As CCAN’s Mike Tidwell has noted, DC’s 5 cent fee on plastic bags has sparked an 80 percent drop in disposable plastic bag use over the past four months.) Now, as ‘industry’ claims to be most concerned about upper bound price, this climate activist would welcome trading slowing the upper bound’s increase over the first decade for accelerating the lower bound’s growth. (How about $15 to $25, with both growing at 4 percent / year above inflation through 2020 (placing this as a $25-$42 range)? Note, again, that a reasonable figure, today, in 2010 is in the range of $85 ... that upper range 2020 figure would be half today’s SCC.)
...some optimism waking up in the morning ... and some realism.
RE Realism — considering the US Senate, if this bill passes more or less in its current form, it will be a miracle. And, that carbon price will start the ball rolling to serious change in the economy ... positive change ... and we should, we hope, be able to build on that success.
RE Realism — much of what is bad in this bill actually is at least slightly better than what passed the House (at least looking at the summary) with the only major critical item in Waxman-Markey ACES not in APA being the Energy Efficiency, which could be because of committee jurisdiction questions / issues rather than what K-L believe matters.
RE Optimism — I didn’t see much to celebrate there but I’m told that the transportation section is far better than what I read it to be along with my missing some fast action material. Both of these could mean that this is better than an initial look suggested.
Finally — To be clear, if John Kerry and his staff had a chance to write a bill that they believe is required and appropriate, it is hard to believe that this is what they would choose to write. Again, political realities seem to trump scientific and physical ones.
Okay ... time to wait for a whole bill to drop and more details to emerge.
Today's eco-diaries:
| Author | Diary | Time | Tags |
|---|
| Unenergy | The Gulf appears to be bleeding - Worse Than BP Admits | Wed, 12 May 2010 03:10:40 Eastern Daylight Time | Gulf of Mexico, Gusher, eKos, Disaster, BP, Deepwater Horizon |
| Something the Dog Said | BP Hearing - What The Traditional Media Did Not Report | Wed, 12 May 2010 10:20:07 Eastern Daylight Time | BP Disaster, Halliburton, Trans Ocean, Gulf Oil Spill, Energy And Work Place Committee, Barbara Boxer, Lamar Alexander, Mary Landrieu, Tim McKay, Blow Out Preventer, Deep Horizon, eKos, Recommended |
| Crashing Vor | BP Terrified... of Morris Bart? | Wed, 12 May 2010 01:00:00 Eastern Daylight Time | Recommended, New Orleans, Louisiana, oil spill, eKos, lawyers, Morris Bart, Deepwater Horizon |
| Meteor Blades | Open Thread for Night Owls: American Power Act | Wed, 12 May 2010 01:15:53 Eastern Daylight Time | Open Thread for Night Owls, American Power Act, eKos |
| FishOutofWater | Is Dispersed Oil in the Loop Current Heading for Florida? | Wed, 12 May 2010 00:23:13 Eastern Daylight Time | Recommended, Gulf oil spill, environment, energy, oil, offshore oil, ekos |
Yesterday's eco-diaries:
| Author | Diary | Time | Tags |
|---|
| Patric Juillet | These (Usual Suspects) Corporations Condone Deforestation | Tue, 11 May 2010 14:56:04 Eastern Daylight Time | eKos, Deforestation, EcoJustice, Environment, Climate Change, Multinationals, Community, Teaching |
| mark louis | Alternative Energy Round-Up | Tue, 11 May 2010 18:23:27 Eastern Daylight Time | Alternative Energy Round-Up, eKos, natural gas, wind energy, Cape Wind project, solar power, biofuels |
| just another vortex | Is capturing the BP gusher this easy? | Tue, 11 May 2010 13:46:01 Eastern Daylight Time | BP, eKos, oil, Gulf of Mexico |
| RLMiller | SeaScum Sen. Lieberman's Climate Bill To Expand Offshore Oil | Tue, 11 May 2010 20:49:28 Eastern Daylight Time | Recommended, climate change, global warming, Oilpocalypse, American Power Act, eKos, Joe Lieberman (I-CT) |
| mwmwm | Sacrificing Amsterdam | Tue, 11 May 2010 12:35:27 Eastern Daylight Time | ekos, dk-greenroots, travel, co2, sacrifice, environment, ecology, tipping points, gulf, energy, Rescued |
| ericlewis0 | Permeable Cone Stocking, a.k.a. 'Oil Corral' - Revised UPDATEDx3 | Tue, 11 May 2010 14:33:48 Eastern Daylight Time | eKos, Permeable Cone Stocking, BP, Gulf of Mexico, oil spill, #oilspill, Oil Corral, Recommended |
| Something the Dog Said | 28% Of Republicans Say BP Disaster Makes Them Want More Drilling | Tue, 11 May 2010 10:15:22 Eastern Daylight Time | BP Disaster, Republicans, Bodine-ism, Polling, Public Policy Polling, Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico, Deep Horizon, eKos |
| gmoke | Zero Net Energy House Winner Is Positive Net Energy House | Tue, 11 May 2010 23:03:33 Eastern Daylight Time | solar, NESEA, energy, ecology, environment, weatherization, insulation, eKos |
| Christian Dem in NC | Lawyer claims rig workers told to deny injury | Tue, 11 May 2010 19:22:40 Eastern Daylight Time | Deepwater Horizon, eKos |
| DWG | DK GreenRoots: Let's Give Virginia A Big Oily Wedgie | Tue, 11 May 2010 21:20:01 Eastern Daylight Time | oil, natural gas, dirty energy, leases, Virginia, oil spill, environment, climate change, energy policy, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Chesapeake Bay, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Tim Kaine, Bob McDonnell, Lease Sale 220, offshore drilling, DK Greenroots, eKos |
| mindoca | About that permeable cone thingy that's been on the rec list...UPDATED at 8AM EDT | Tue, 11 May 2010 21:18:27 Eastern Daylight Time | Recommended, BP, oil, oil spill, Gulf of Mexico, eKos, Netroots Nation, scholarship, DFA, community |
Here is the eco-series line-up:
(All times Eastern!)
About eKos
The Idea
This project was inspired by the Earth Day @ DKos Blogathon. In case you missed it, we had 31 participating environmental diaries, all of which were linked to in the Mothership. During the event we had several requests for an eco-mothership diary series in the mould of the Earth Day effort.
The Mission
eKos is all about promoting community eco-diaries. Daily Kos already showcases several series, but sometimes the work of dedicated green diarists pass off the recent diary list hardly noticed. Our goal is to make these diaries more accessible. In the process we hope to build community and bring in a broader audience to the exceptional environmental writing here at DK.
eKos Schedule
For now, look for us M-W-F-Su in the AM.
How eKos Works
If you want a diary included in the list, please let us know by leaving a comment. We'll do our best to search out green diaries, but are bound to miss a few. For eKos to live up to it's full potential, eco-diarists will need to post a link to the mothership at the end of their diary. This will provide readers with easy access to other recent environmental diaries.
Requirements
eKos is meant to be inclusive, but we will have standards for quality and content of listed diaries. (As long as you don't violate site rules and have a modicum of relevant, original content, you should be fine.)
'eKos' tag
If your diary gets listed, we'll ask you to add the eKos tag to your diary.
Contact
You can follow us on Twitter
If you are interested in becoming an eco-ranger for eKos, or just want some more info, e-mail ekos350atgmaildotcom
eKos Rangers
In no particular order:
Regina in a Sears Kit House
boatsie
Hopeful Skeptic
RLMiller
Ellinorianne
Earthfire
A Siegel
dRefractor
SolarMom
Please give them some mojo if you see them, they deserve it!
Get the eKos widget code!
