The Senate Energy Bill's Other Shoe

So yesterday I looked on the bright side of the Senate's clean energy bill and proclaimed my delight that there is such a thing. Though naturally, this is not the whole story.

Not least bad, according to an update at the Wonk Room, is that Brad Plumer is reporting that the Chamber of Commerce likes this bill. Probably because it will both preempt higher state emission standards (a big middle finger to the State of California, which has been a national leader in this field) and end the EPA as an actor in climate policy enforcement.

Because the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, that's probably a no go. While any bill passed will be insufficient to the needs of the situation, it will be hard to make even a good start towards solving emissions problems without preserving federal ability to regulate them. The Center for Biological Diversity explained the consequences today:

Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham have agreed to craft a climate change bill which will ban the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, increase oil and gas drilling (including off-shore drilling), subsidize nuclear energy, and allow atmospheric carbon dioxide to grow to catastrophic levels by not requiring economy-wide greenhouse gas emission cuts sufficient to reduce CO2 levels to 350 parts per million or less.

In response, Center for Biological Diversity Executive Director Kieran Suckling issued the following statement: “If correctly reported, the Kerry, Lieberman, Graham approach is unacceptable. It won’t stop global warming, and by attacking the Clean Air Act, it will remove the only tool we currently have that can do so.

... “The Clean Air Act has protected the air we breathe for 40 years, reaping economic benefits 42 times its cost. We should implement it fully today and craft climate legislation that complements, not weakens it.

“Scientists have determined that reducing carbon pollution to 350 parts per million is necessary to preserve life as we know it. 350 part per million must be the bottom line for all climate and energy policies. House and Senate members should reject all legislation that does not require greenhouse gas reductions sufficient to reduce the current atmospheric level of carbon dioxide from 387 parts per million to 350.”

Now as discussed, this is also supposed to be a climate bill offered with the intention of preserving the world more or less as we found it. The CBD folks have it right, this bill won't remotely do that, nor would any bill that had a prayer of passing this Congress.

Nor will the proposed legislation reduce dependence on unreliable and damaging energy sources sufficiently. In fact, it wastes valuable resources on the ratholes of the still-profitable fossil fuel industry, and the pointless waste of the nuclear industry.

Regarding oil, even the Kuwaiti oil industry and experts are predicting that peak oil will come in the next few years. Granted, predictions that it would hit in 2006 were premature, but it's coming soon. Peak oil won't be the end of oil, but it will spell the end of cheap oil, which prices have only gone down recently because the global economy crashed and destroyed a great deal of demand following a series of speculative bubbles.

This bill doesn't do much to remove oil dependence, which the world airline industry already recognizes as a serious problem such that they're actively looking for alternatives.

Regarding nuclear energy, I've said it before and will say it again, nuclear energy is a total waste of money. It can't come on line fast enough to help reduce short-term emissions and the world nuclear industry was already in decline because it's a poor market competitor for reasons that have nothing at all to do with concerns about nuclear proliferation or the environment.

This bill, as its predecessors have all done, will throw away money on a dying industry for very little reason. Some argue that it can help get us off of coal, but the expense is such that it's hard to see why, besides the fact that everyone in DC seems to have an enormous man-crush on John McCain, our money wouldn't be spent better elsewhere.

At the least, the nuclear issue would annoy me less if more people would in fact replace the vague, perpetual comment that nuclear power has to be "part of the mix," with the more truthful reflection that buying dozens of largely unwanted, unaffordable nuclear power stations is the only way to get around Sen. McCain.

Regarding coal, the coal industry is simply an irredeemably bad actor in our society. Yes, we produce half our energy from coal, but we don't have to and could switch off of it by 2030 if we set our minds to it. And no matter what you've been told, 'clean' coal doesn't exist.

'Clean' coal is the Tooth Fairy of the energy debate. It's a useful fiction that allows Congress to put money under the coal industry's pillow and claim they're doing it for the environment. It's a lie that pays out hard cash for worthless teeth.

There are regions that have made carbon sequestration from emissions work. Though even if you ignore the decidedly unclean practices of coal mining, and the sulfur, mercury and other toxic effluent released from coal-fired power generation, sequestration relies on local access to specific geological formations that a) don't exist everywhere and b) aren't all known to work as would be needed.

Can these formations store gaseous carbon emissions for millennia without contaminating drinking water aquifers or otherwise harmfully leaking? The jury has been out on both the widespread use and cost effectiveness of this technology for a suspiciously long time.

Bringing us back around to the issue of what to do in order to tilt the playing field away from coal when favorable regulations and tax breaks have allowed it to price its cleaner, more efficient competitors out of the market. This bill is very little help on that front, and might even leave us worse off than when we started, emissions-wise.

But hey, it's Friday. So I'm perfectly justified in trading this keyboard for a hard cider, whether I've been reading about subpar legislative efforts or not. And thank goodness.

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