Will We Get A Senate Energy Bill? Will It Be Better Than Nothing?

Brad Johnson at the Wonk Room went through and compared the leaked Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Clean Energy Bil to the Waxman-Markey version passed by the House and President Obama's proposed plan.

(How much will the leaks resemble the final version? No one knows. So take the following remarks under advisement that there's no guarantee that K-G-L as publicly released will look anything like this draft.)

In short, it echoes the Senate version of the jobs bill: a bland, stripped down version of the House bill that's conceivably better than nothing. Though it spends a lot of money on coal and nuclear plants, which the jobs bill, even with all its missed opportunities, couldn't be accused of.

Because the legislative arena has been so relentlessly depressing lately, and with this bill probably the best that can pass, while it will almost certainly get terrible, terrible things added to it during committee markup, I'm going to focus on the bright points. What the heck. After all, it's only been released in bits, I don't yet know that they're going to gut EPA authority to regulate carbon emissions.

First is the Cantwell-Collins language, which prohibits derivatives trading on auctions and keeps uninvolved third parties out of the carbon market. Please, gods, let this make it into the final version of the legislation.

Annie Leonard took a lot of flak for criticizing potential abuses of carbon markets, but seriously, we just went through a world financial crisis precipitated by widespread, as-yet-unprosecuted financial fraud and derivatives trading based on a dodgily run real estate market. Do we want to see a repeat of that disastrous bubble again based on the carbon market? I don't think so.

If we're going to have a carbon market, considering that our inherited oversight institutions clearly don't work that well, just let's reduce the potential for wild arabesques of greed to bring the whole thing down around our ears.

Second, there seem to be carbon tariffs on imports included. Yes! At last, something to cushion the artificial cheapness of imports and moderately protect domestic production. Every other industrialized nation we trade with has some form of domestically beneficial trade adjustment which makes our goods more expensive in their markets, and their goods cheaper in our markets. I'd want to know what the final language would be, but it sounds good for domestic manufacturing.

Environmentally, this is also good policy, so thank goodness it's made it into a clean energy bill. What with all the polluter giveaways, coal subsidies and whatnot that Congress is so fond of, you can never be sure.

Though whether you want to make an environmental or economic argument about it, long distance transport is artificially cheap right now. The prices of petroleum products don't reflect either their long-term economic value and scarcity or their significant external costs imposed on the health of people and the environment.

Lastly, this isn't in the bill, but should be: the Apollo Alliance cordially invites you to ask your Senators to support the inclusion of Sen. Sherrod Brown's IMPACT Act.

Brown's Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technologies Act, would provide $30 billion in revolving loans to invest in clean energy development, and particularly support the retooling and expansion of facilities for small and medium sized manufacturers. Brown's home state of Ohio alone could gain between forty to fifty thousand jobs.

The IMPACT Act, being a loan fund, should provide good return on investment for the nation. Along with the Energy Department's steady support for a renewable energy market this could be the way to save what's left of the manufacturing supply chain and the auto parts machine shops that got massacred when Detroit's Big Three imploded.

So again, I say, I implore, ask your Senators to support the inclusion of Sen. Sherrod Brown's IMPACT Act in the Clean Energy legislation. It would be a win-win-win for the environment, the economy and American workers.

If that's all the extra good we get out of this bill, it'd be better than nothing. That's getting to be a high bar for new legislation these days.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future