ENERGY/CLIMATE BILL FAR FROM THE PROMISE

Congress abandoning Obama clean energy goals
H. Josef Hebert, June 10, 2009 (AP)
and
GOP slams Democrats' climate bill as an energy tax
H. Josef Hebert, June 13, 2009 (AP via Yahoo News)

SUMMARY
President Truman was known to have asked people not to tell his mother he was in politics because, he told them, his mother was contentedly laboring under the illusion he was a piano player in a house of prostitution and he wouldn’t want his mother’s opinion of him to fall.

The Democratic leaders in Congress, forced by political circumstances to backpedal from the goal of a potent Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), are demonstrating why President Truman made the joke.

President Obama ran on a campaign pledge to pass an RES requiring regulated utilities to obtain 25% of their power from New Energy sources by 2025. That was the standard in the original version of the flagship legislation, H.R. 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, brought to the House by powerhouse Representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif), Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Markey (D-Mass), Chair of the Energy Subcomittee.

Diminished. (click to enlarge)

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, proposed an RES with a 20% by 2021 requirement.

Compromises with conservative Democrats from fossil fuel-dependent and New Energy-deficient states followed. The House will in the next 1-to-2 weeks consider a diminished 20% by 2020 measure. A diminished 15% by 2021 measure is expected to emerge from Senator Bingaman’s committee but is not given a strong chance of being considered by the Senate due to the threat of a filibuster by conservative Democrats and Republicans.

As if to accentuate just how far apart the ambitions of New Energy advocates and their opponents actually are, the Republican Party used its Saturday Internet/radio address to attack the Democrats’ energy/climate bill and summarize their own plan.

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Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind) called the Waxman-Markey bill’s cap&trade proposal an energy tax and called for more domestic oil and gas production and a doubling of nuclear power plants in the next 20 years.

He repeated the Republican position that the cap&trade system would raise U.S. ratepayers energy bills and fail to stop the increase in greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) because it would not stop the generation of GhGs by the BRIC emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China).

The Democrats say cap&trade costs can be controlled by making the system revenue neutral and they believe the BRIC nations will follow with their own GhG reduction policies if the U.S. leads.

The Republican plan echoes 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain’s (R-Ariz) call for an energy plan that promotes New Energy as well as the traditional energies. It would use revenues from oil and gas drilling royalties to fund New Energy. Unlike Senator McCain’s plan, however, the House Republican energy plan opposes any cap on GhG-generation.

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COMMENTARY
The House and Senate RESs are actually much weaker than the numbers on the “label” suggest because of compromises allowing some utilities to be exempted from some of the requirements and allowing state Governors to lower the New Energy requirement in favor of instituting Energy Efficiencies.

The compromised Waxman-Markey measure allows utilities to meet 40% of the 20% New Energy requirement through efficiency programs. The compromised Bingaman plan allows 25% of the 15% to come from efficiencies.

Both bills exempt most publicly owned utilities, though they represent ~10% of U.S. power generation. Both bills reduce the requirements as applied to new coal plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) capability, a technology that does not actually exist at any significant scale. And both reduce the requirements as applied to new nuclear plants or increased generation capacity at existing nuclear plants over the next 10 years.

The EPA found the compromised bill does little to stop the advance of coal and its disasterous impact on climate. (click to enlarge)

Marchant Wentworth of the Union of Concerned Scientists called the exemptions “backdoor” reductions of the standards and said the fine print could put the New Energy requirement in the Senate bill as low as 8-to-9% and as low as 12% in the House bill.

Mark Sinclair of Clean Energy States Alliance says a National Renewable Energy Laboratory analysis (Comparative Analysis of Three Proposed Federal Renewable Electricity Standards) concluded the compromised RESs could result in less New Energy in 2030 than would come from no measure whatsoever in conjunction with existing state RESs and the recent stimulus funding.

President Truman is said to have once attended a backroom meeting of Congressmen and told them to always vote as their Party leaders dictated and then, on exiting the room and being asked by reporters what his advice to Congressmen was, said, "Always vote your conscience."

In the same spirit, the sponsors of the Senate and House measures continued to promise improvements in the legislation. Such improvements, their compromises made clear, are actually impossible if the bills are to reach floor votes.

The left is not happy. (click to enlarge)

Near the end of his life, President Truman, it is said, remarked that Congress has more morons than patriots.

There are strong rumblings - at meetings, on conference calls, in chatrooms and across the blogosphere - among environmentalists and committed New Energy advocates, who are many more patriots than morons, of abandoning the Waxman-Markey and Bingaman proposals altogether. Most have concluded the NREL report barely gets at the ways Congress’s proposals have emasculated the attack on global climate change it would have its constituents believe it is championing.

The RES aside, Representatives Waxman and Markey were also forced into compromises in their groundbreaking cap&trade system. The President's campaign platform and the first draft of H.R. 2454 called for a 100% auction of cap&trade emissions allowances. Compromises forced by conservative Democrats reduced to 15% the number of auctioned allowances, essentially assigning to big coal, utility and manufacturing industries the privilege of spew for the near future.

Time, however, is running out. If political opposition has neutralized the political effort against climate change, is hope lost?

No. Hope lies in 2 directions.

The choice to accept Waxman-Markey - as many important environmental groups are doing, in the spirit of supporting the Democrats' best efforts - means a commitment to enacting its provisions this year and an even deeper commitment to making it potent next year.

A defeat of Waxman-Markey leaves in place the right of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to attack GhG emissions in court. It will be a long, ugly fight, but it will be a fight and not – as the legislation coming before the House soon and the Senate later seems to be – a surrender.

The right is not happy. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind): "During these difficult times, the American people don't want a national energy tax out of Washington, D.C.,.. The Republican energy plan calls for more domestic exploration for oil and natural gas, renewed commitment to clean emission-free nuclear energy, investments in renewable and alternative energy technologies and incentives to spur greater conservation among individuals and businesses…"
- Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), on the Republican energy plan: "[It is] the same tired policies embraced [by the Bush administration]…at a time when Americans are seeking new solutions to rebuild our economy and break our dependence on foreign energy sources."

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- Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Chair, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee: "I urged the committee to adopt a stronger standard and we clearly didn't have the votes for that…"
- Mark Sinclair, spokesman, Clean Energy States Alliance: "[The RESs] are very weak and really will not require any additional renewables beyond what states already are doing…It will be meaningless. It's just a gesture…"