Americans Have Spoken: We Want Clean Energy

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org. Posted December 12, 2007.

Last Thursday, the US House of Representatives passed, by a 235-181 vote, the Energy Independence and Security Act. This new energy bill includes measures that would increase car fuel mileage, restore taxes on Big Oil to pay for investments in solar, wind and energy efficiency, and mandate that electric utilities generate 15 percent of their power using renewable energy.

On Friday, the same bill passed the Senate by 53 votes in favor to 42 opposed. Republicans then threatened to filibuster, raising the bar for passage to 60 votes. The Senate will work on revisions and is expected to bring a modified bill to the floor sometime this week, but giant corporations are working overtime to trash as much of the renewable energy substance as they can.

The renewable electricity mandate and the oil tax package are the two provisions attracting the most opposition, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling them "twin millstones ... around its neck."

According to a Bloomberg report, Rudy Giuliani's lobbying firm has taken a leading role in trying to "strangle" the bill on behalf of the utility and oil industries.

Despite the blockage in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was widely praised for passing the renewable energy and efficiency provisions, and Democrats are touting the achievement as an illustration of what they would accomplish on climate change and energy independence if given control of government in 2008.

Following the Senate vote, Senator John Kerry flew to Bali to discuss climate policy with world leaders and to let them know he is convinced that "the politics of 2009 in the United States are going to be just night and day, different from where we have been before." Commenting on the Senate vote, Kerry said, "The energy vote today -- and the message the Roadblock Republicans risk sending far and wide across the globe -- is a gigantic reminder why we're still one election away from bringing the biggest and boldest change to Washington."

Proponents of the House-passed energy bill have called it a "down payment" on a climate change strategy. With the "down payment" now in jeopardy, climate activists organized by the US Climate Emergency Council (USCEC) planned to conduct a sit-in today inside the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The activists will demand that McConnell meet with them to discuss retaining strong support for renewable energy in the revised Senate energy bill.

A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) confirms that the House bill would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study found that the legislation would prevent over 190 million metric tons of global warming pollution in 2020 -- equivalent to taking 28 million of today's average cars and trucks off the road in that year.

The UCS study also shows the bill to be effective at reducing America's dependence on foreign oil, finding that full implementation of the measures will save about 1.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2020 - half of what the United States currently imports from the Persian Gulf. Even after paying for the necessary fuel economy technology, the study finds, in 2020 American consumers will save $22 billion in energy costs.

And then there are the jobs. While no one is predicting the exact number of jobs this energy bill would create, Democrats are saying that major investments in renewable energy could create three million green jobs over 10 years. With its renewable electricity mandate and expanded production tax credits for wind and solar energy, the House-passed energy bill would almost certainly spark such major investment. The package also creates a program to train a quality workforce for "green" collar jobs such as solar panel manufacturing and installation.

On the other side of the energy divide, a report released by the American Petroleum Institute (API) in November says that energy bill provisions would destroy five million jobs by 2030.

Pete Morton, a senior resource economist for the Wilderness Society, called it "a biased study that only looks at the costs but not the benefits of the proposed legislation."

The API study claims that closing tax loopholes for Big Oil will cause an increase in energy prices that will slow economic growth, leading to the job losses. But the bipartisan Congressional Joint Economic Committee found that closing the $13.5 billion in tax loopholes would have no effect on oil production decisions and, consequently, no effect on consumer prices for gasoline and natural gas.

Big Oil and its friends claim that restoring the oil industry's tax burden will leave the industry short of funds needed to develop new oil and gas resources. But Daniel J. Weiss of American Progress says, "This ignores the over half a trillion dollars in combined profits earned by the big five oil companies since 2001... The $13.5 billion in tax breaks, collected over a decade, is less than three percent of these companies' total profits over the last seven years. BP, Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil each had more than $13.5 billion in profits during the first three quarters of 2007. The closed loopholes are a drop in the barrel compared with big oil profits."

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Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry.

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