Ben Dova...
Posted on 10/30/2007 4:35:40 PM PDT by Shermy
After years of debates and documentaries, Congress is poised to address the issue of climate change.
The Warner-Lieberman bill is the vehicle and it’s headed for a bumpy ride, as industries mobilize to set up roadblocks to stall or wreck the passage of legislation that could cost them millions.
Advocates are equally passionate, and they include some heavy hitters. Co-sponsor John Warner (R-Va.), who is retiring, plans to make it his “top priority for the next 14 months that I’m blessed to be in this Senate,” he said. An industry lobbyist said Warner pressed Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) on the Senate floor last week to urge members to support the bill.
Connecticut Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s environmental subcommittee has scheduled a markup of the bill on Thursday, with all eyes on Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), uncommitted members of the subcommittee who may not back the bill if they decide it is not tough enough on business polluters.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, wants to pass the bill before a major United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in Bali in December.
The final detail likely to be worked out is also the one with the most cash riding on it: whether to allocate carbon emission credits or to auction them off.
“Allocate” is legislative slang for “give away” — the system industry naturally favors. The alternative is to sell the credits at auction, which would raise revenue that could be reinvested in subsidies for companies to invest in green technology or be given to consumers facing increased energy costs. The environmental community favors a full auction. The current bill is a mix of allocation and auction but tilted toward allocation.
Though the allocation-vs.-auction debate doesn’t have the glamour of an Al Gore documentary, “that’s where the winners and losers are made,” said Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
Big Green
Environmentalists are pushing for an auction of 100 percent of the emission credits. “We are absolutely not going to endorse it” without a full auction, said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. U.S. PIRG and Friends of the Earth are also calling for 100 percent auctions. Other prominent environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which testified last week in favor of an auction, have been willing to compromise with less than 100 percent.
NRDC, Environmental Defense, the Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation are part of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of industry and environmental groups, which last week sent Lieberman and Warner a letter that said the legislation appears to meet the requirements for cap-and-trade legislation that the coalition had previously laid out.
The letter didn’t endorse the bill, and some environmentalists are willing to forgo action now with hopes that a more Democratic Congress after the 2008 elections will deliver a stronger bill, Slocum said. “I don’t think we’re going to see climate change legislation become law this session,” he said, adding that a “bill that survives a filibuster in the Senate and then a presidential veto in this Congress isn’t going to be effective.”
Big Steel, Big Cement and Big Aluminum
Steel is sweating over the proposed legislation. Its industrial process inherently spews high amounts of carbon, and because of foreign competition it can’t pass the costs off to customers. “We’re generally opposed to a cap-and-trade-style approach as it pertains to energy-intensive industries,” said Scott Salmon, a lobbyist with U.S. Steel.
U.S. Steel spent more than $6 million lobbying in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; the steel industry as a whole spent more than $10 million. Steelmaker Nucor Corp. has already spent more than a million dollars this year on lobbying.
Big Cement isn’t much happier. It, too, faces foreign competition and can’t easily pass costs on to customers. John Shaw, a lobbyist with the Portland Cement Association, said that his industry has “concerns” with the bill but hasn’t moved to outright opposition.
Big Aluminum, on the other hand, stands to win big, which explains why Alcoa was on hand to testify in favor of the bill. Not only did the industry begin greenhouse gas reductions in the mid-’90s, it relies largely on renewable hydropower, and much of its product is made from recycled material. In an economy-wide push to lower emissions, it would also benefit as the main component of solar panels and as a replacement for steel in vehicles looking to lose weight in order to increase fuel efficiency.
Big Coal, Big Power and Big Oil
“We don’t think much of it,” said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association. The coal industry gave nearly $2.5 million in campaign contributions in the 2006 cycle, 85 percent of it to the GOP, according to CRP, and spent more than $7 million lobbying.
The “fundamental flaw,” he said, is that the bill “still puts the policy cart before the technology horse.” The coal industry argues that it simply couldn’t meet the requirements given current technology and would be forced to switch to the lower-emitting natural gas, as European utilities did. Such a switch would lower carbon emissions, but only in the short term, and would delay the advent of carbon sequestration or other technology to make coal cleaner.
“We are not going to support a bill that we think is irresponsible just to say we are in favor of a solution,” Popovich said.
Several major power companies are part of U.S. Climate Action Partnership, and under the European scheme utilities have made out quite well. In part, that’s because they can pass costs on to consumers. Still, Big Power is wary.
“Between now and 2030, there will be a 40 percent increase in demand growth,” said Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute, the utilities trade association. “The emission reduction requirements significantly outpace our abilities to achieve them.”
Big Oil is also leery. Lou Hayden, a senior analyst with the American Petroleum Institute, said that “top-line members” of his association “were surprised how much transportation has to bear the burden in this bill. … We’d like, at a minimum, for this bill not to move quickly until some of these things are addressed.”
Big Nuclear
Warner and Lieberman both said that the bill left out nuclear for early-stage political reasons and that it would be brought back up as it moved forward. Environmental groups broadly oppose it.
Nuclear power, which is a low-carbon source of energy, is a potential winner if there is a cap on emissions — whether it’s written into the bill or not. “As long as there’s no specific prohibition, nuclear’s obviously going to benefit in a cap-and-trade scenario,” said Craig Piercy, Washington representative for the American Nuclear Society.
Big Religion
The National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a powerful coalition of both liberal and conservative evangelical religious organizations, is heavily involved in climate-change discussions.
It’s a well-connected group. Dan Gerstein, a former senior staffer for Lieberman who still consults for him (and is an occasional contributor to Politico) consults for the coalition.
The main issue the churches have been discussing — directly with Boxer and the staffs of Lieberman and Warner — is to restore a provision that was in a previous iteration of the bill that included funding to aid the poor internationally, said the partnership’s executive director, Paul Gorman. “As presently written, the legislation is fundamentally flawed,” he said.
I believe this is the best article I’ve seen anywhere on the current bills. Of course, that might no be saying much since the MSM is wholly silent on the most important bill facing us today, cap and trade. Maybe it is too complicated an issue. WSJ came out, meekly, against. I guess they’re waiting to see which way their subscribers want it to go.
A failing in this article, IMO, is in the lists of “Bigs” the author misses the Biggest of the Bigs - Big Finance, the traders, part of The Democrat money base for over twenty years.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, wants to pass the bill before a major United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in Bali in December.This is important for the carbon traders, because they need a sense of security that the USA is on-board with this financial fraud, so they have a place to dump their carbon credits for real money. The "carbon market" already collapsed once in Europe.
As for the auction v. gifting debate, it's a choice of woefully wrong to outrageously wrong. the auctioning is a band aid on a big wound. The big players will be better suited to push out the smaller businesses by lobbying etc. for findings their output is less than actual, all sorts of accounting scams come with this scam.
I also have a concern this will lead to deindustrialization, and have a feeling cos. like Ford Motors plan to close factories and earn carbon credits for such actions.
What a bunch of Stalinists. And now Mike Huckabee has endorsed this giant steaming load.
They won't endorse it, but when President Bush vetoes it they'll scream that he's done the most possible harm to "the planet."
“I see that Big Religion is involved in lobbying.”
I suspect they were coopted into it later. Probably mostly dupes of front orgs of the financial industries. Could be getting some payoffs, but certainly the Liberal MSM is revelling in pointing these people out, favoring them with congrats, comparing them to “conservatives” with unfavorable text. Not unlike how they trot out every six months or so some “liberal evangelists” to pretend their their anti-religious biases aren’t so.
Watch for the “carbon tax”. The end goal of all this nonsense: get the government’s fangs into more and more businesses.
They are no more Stalinists than Michael Milken and Drexel-Burnham Lambert were. BTW, Milken is a big rooter for carbon trading.
This is a financial industry-pushed scam. They got Gore to attach it to “Kyoto” in 1998. Wall Street Financiers dream of tens of billions of dollars, maybe hundreds, in trading fees...if not that anymore, dumping the billions of Euro carbon credits they hold now. Manufacturing interests want out, special privileges, or accept carbon trading as a fait accompli, so are gaming it to their relative advantage over competitors.
The carbon trading money on the Republican side might have moved to Huckabee since McCain looks like a loser. The money is much bigger on the Dem side, with Obama, Hillary and Edwards all on the take. Obama is kind of dumb about it though, he openly talks about cap and trade as if it were a good idea, Hillary quieter, more experienced, and no less juiced.
The religious left does not need any encouragement to engage in Marxist political speech. They are very active in many lefty causes. The environment is a good fit because they can feel spiritual about saving mother earth.
“”Watch for the “carbon tax”””
The Carbon Tax is the antitheisis, of sorts, of Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade fears the carbon tax because it takes out the major player - Wall Street financial firms.
I’ve read it advocated by some industries who accept the fait accompli of carbon laws, and they point out how, in economic theory, it would work better to reduce carbon emissions than cap and trade, which also has been an unmitigated failure in Europe.
They’re spending time on and seriously discussing this silliness? Are there no grownups in Congress?
That's what happens when you have a gov't composed on one party with two names.
That's the purpose of it, isn't it?
Environmentalism is a growing “big religion” itself, and a rival to Christianity. They do not overlap very much at all.
Dem voters think they stand for the little guy, Michigan is a blue state. Wonder what will happen when thousands of auto workers are out of work. Enviros used to only cost loggers, fishermen jobs. The large auto industry is now in the crosshairs.
If Marxism was a project to bring History to an end in the near future, Environmentalism is an attempt to freeze History in the distant past. Not for the benefit of mankind, nor even when you come to think of it, for Nature -- unless man is excluded from the account -- but for the sake of having the power to end history on their terms. They will not succeed and man will go on. No less than the trees and stars we have a right to be here.
--Wretchard, The Belmont Club, 29 October 2007
Ah. Been reading David Horowitz and smartening up, have you?
Grok this: Goldman, Sachs supplied both DIRTXPOTUS and Bush43 with Treasury secretaries. Now one of Goldman's young executive princes is dating Chelsea.
"Pattern? What pattern?" <yawn, stretch, rub eyes>
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