Clean Energy Bill Survives: Political Realists Rejoice, Climate Science Realists Demand More

By Joseph Romm, Climate Progress. Posted May 22, 2009.

The polluting industries spend vast sums of money on lobbyists, on deceptive ads, and on right wing think tanks who spread disinformation.  The status quo media under-reports and misreports the climate science and climate economics.  The climate science activists can't even agree on a message or whether they should even talk about climate science.  From a political perspective, Democrats are being asked to face an onslaught of deceptive campaign ads claiming they have raised energy taxes in order to pass a bill whose climate benefits will not be apparent for a very long time -- although the clean energy and jobs benefits will begin almost immediately (Nobelist Krugman: Climate action "now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump" by giving "businesses a reason to invest in new equipment and facilities").  And many of their constituents, primarily the conservatives and the conservative-leaning independents, don't even think human caused global warming is a problem that needs aggressive government action, assuming they think it is a problem at all (see here).

From the perspective of political realism, it will be a great challenge just to stop this bill from being weakened as it winds itself through the House and especially the Senate.

From the perspective of climate science realists, the bill has two gaping flaws.  And I don't mean the allocations for big polluters.  I know many of my readers disagree, but I just don't think that the allocation undermines the goals of the bill at all, and in fact are a perfectly reasonable way of satisfying political needs while preventing windfalls for polluters and preserving prices.

The first flaw is the 2 billion offsets that polluters can potentially use instead of their own emissions reductions.  I have previously explained why I am far less worried about domestic offsets (see here).  In a regulated market with a cap, many of the domestic offsets will represent real reductions of US greenhouse gas emissions, and the total supply of cheap domestic offsets will be limited.  I will blog tomorrow on why I do not believe the international offsets threaten the overall integrity of the bill.  The bottom line is that the vast amounts of moderate-cost near-term domestic emissions reductions strategies -- energy efficiency, conservation, replacing coal power with natural gas-fired power, wind power, biomass cofiring, concentrated solar thermal power, recycled energy, geothermal, and hydro power (see "An introduction to the core climate solutions") –  will be cheaper (in quantity) than most of the offsets will be in 2020.

Second, the 2020 target is too weak (see here).  Given the lost 8 years of the Bush administration, it was inevitable that a bill which doesn't even impose a cap until 2012 could not have the same 2020 target (compared to 1990 levels) than the Europeans are considering.

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