...Or maybe they were both bad news
May. 27th, 2009 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4life"Haste makes waste."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
- John Godfrey Saxe
Yesterday, I referred to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act's bright prospects for relatively swift passage through the U.S. House as good news. This evening from 6 to 8 PM, I sat at a table on a concourse of the local mall and tried to talk passersby into supporting this 932-page bill, with no more than a sound-byte-level analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. Then I came home and discovered an article on Grist that argues persuasively that "The [central] cap-and-trade portion [of the ACES Act] is worse than doing nothing." To elaborate:
"Waxman-Markey issues a large percent of permits to the final emitter of pollution, rather than those who first extract or import oil or gas or coal. This is referred to as downstream permitting, and Peter Dorman at Econospeak explains why downstream permitting is a disaster. . . . 'Reductions are calculated from a baseline, but there are acres of wriggle room about how to measure who emitted how much in the base year and therefore how much should be reduced tomorrow. Enforcement is complex, expensive and full of loopholes.' . . .
"The bill’s use of offsets is another disaster. Dan Welch defines an offset as 'an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.' The Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) generates offsets. . . . Since credits generated by CDM are used as permissions to burn coal inside the EU, credit granted for a project that would have happened anyway increases net emissions. . . .
"Both developing nations that would generate [carbon] credits and potential buyers of those credits have enormous incentives to make high projections [of what they would have emitted under 'Business As Usual'] and thus create counterfeit carbon credits. Large corporations would put the pressure on to approve such scenarios because the credits generated would be a cheap alternative to investing in real emissions reductions, or purchase of limited non-counterfeit credits. The State Department would probably add to this pressure as a cheap pay-off for support in whatever the latest ill-advised U.S. military or economic venture was. . . .
"Giving away [most of the greenhouse-emission] permits also adds to the pressure for issuing too many credits. Increasing the number of permits always lowers the price to polluters. But issuing more permits when most are given away also increases the number of permits polluters have [available] to sell. . . .
"The long-term effects are even worse. The point of supporting a weak bill in area like this would be to build political infrastructure. Even if the standards were low, we could fight to plug better numbers into existing regulations. But with Waxman-Markey, we not only have to fight to change the numbers. We have to replace most of the architecture—downstream caps with upstream ones, offsets with requirements for real reductions, giveaways with auctioning. If we pass Waxman-Markey, we still end up with a[nother] whole climate bill to pass. And that climate bill will need to be fought for under worse conditions than starting from scratch. We will have to win auctions when powerful political actors are accustomed to free permits. We will have to repeal offsets against the opposition of the entire corporate and foreign policy establishment. We will have to fight to move downstream caps upstream over the objections of a large establishment who will have made huge investments in gaming the complicated loophole-ridden structure."
So as far as I can see, there are three possible reactions to this:
- Benjamin Franklin
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
- John Godfrey Saxe
Yesterday, I referred to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act's bright prospects for relatively swift passage through the U.S. House as good news. This evening from 6 to 8 PM, I sat at a table on a concourse of the local mall and tried to talk passersby into supporting this 932-page bill, with no more than a sound-byte-level analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. Then I came home and discovered an article on Grist that argues persuasively that "The [central] cap-and-trade portion [of the ACES Act] is worse than doing nothing." To elaborate:
"Waxman-Markey issues a large percent of permits to the final emitter of pollution, rather than those who first extract or import oil or gas or coal. This is referred to as downstream permitting, and Peter Dorman at Econospeak explains why downstream permitting is a disaster. . . . 'Reductions are calculated from a baseline, but there are acres of wriggle room about how to measure who emitted how much in the base year and therefore how much should be reduced tomorrow. Enforcement is complex, expensive and full of loopholes.' . . .
"The bill’s use of offsets is another disaster. Dan Welch defines an offset as 'an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.' The Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) generates offsets. . . . Since credits generated by CDM are used as permissions to burn coal inside the EU, credit granted for a project that would have happened anyway increases net emissions. . . .
"Both developing nations that would generate [carbon] credits and potential buyers of those credits have enormous incentives to make high projections [of what they would have emitted under 'Business As Usual'] and thus create counterfeit carbon credits. Large corporations would put the pressure on to approve such scenarios because the credits generated would be a cheap alternative to investing in real emissions reductions, or purchase of limited non-counterfeit credits. The State Department would probably add to this pressure as a cheap pay-off for support in whatever the latest ill-advised U.S. military or economic venture was. . . .
"Giving away [most of the greenhouse-emission] permits also adds to the pressure for issuing too many credits. Increasing the number of permits always lowers the price to polluters. But issuing more permits when most are given away also increases the number of permits polluters have [available] to sell. . . .
"The long-term effects are even worse. The point of supporting a weak bill in area like this would be to build political infrastructure. Even if the standards were low, we could fight to plug better numbers into existing regulations. But with Waxman-Markey, we not only have to fight to change the numbers. We have to replace most of the architecture—downstream caps with upstream ones, offsets with requirements for real reductions, giveaways with auctioning. If we pass Waxman-Markey, we still end up with a[nother] whole climate bill to pass. And that climate bill will need to be fought for under worse conditions than starting from scratch. We will have to win auctions when powerful political actors are accustomed to free permits. We will have to repeal offsets against the opposition of the entire corporate and foreign policy establishment. We will have to fight to move downstream caps upstream over the objections of a large establishment who will have made huge investments in gaming the complicated loophole-ridden structure."
So as far as I can see, there are three possible reactions to this:
- Does the whole environmental movement need to abandon this bill, wait another year or three for one that gets these issues right, and let the EPA's proposed regulation of greenhouse gases fill the gap? (Or is there too much political downside in rejecting a bill with as many amazingly good provisions as this one has? Maybe the politicians will write us all off as being impossible to please.)
- Would it actually be a good idea to try to pass the ACES Act without its central cap-and-trade mechanism? (Or would that look ridiculous to the rest of the world, since we all know that a descending cap on greenhouse emissions is what needs to happen to save the global climate?)
- Or is this author full of crap, bashing a system that can be made to work with a few good amendments, and is the best we're ever going to get, given the interests of those in power? (Or does that just mean we need a full-scale revolution, as Dr. Glen Barry advocates?)
