The Abrams Clean Tech Report

 

Senate Climate Bill A ‘Dry Run’ [RE: S. 2191: America's Climate Security Act of 2007]

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Leave it to Mother Nature to send a message to our esteemed politicians in Washington DC on the day the first Climate Bill is being debated in the Senate…in the form of a freak storm. I’m not sure how many of you heard about the weather- including a hurricane warning – and a lengthy power outage – that affected the DC and Maryland areas earlier this week back East, but sure enough, that’s what happened. Apparently she wasn’t too happy with the way things went in the debate, which is another way of saying that the Bill didn’t end up going anywhere.

Word is that the Republican leadership threw a monkey wrench in the debate, employing some procedural tactics to delay the bill, which included asking the clerk to read the 492 page document…in its entirety…out loud. Here’s the breakdown of votes: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s2008-143. I actually spent a couple of hours slogging through the text of the Bill last night, to educate myself on what’s in it. Interestingly, for those of you unaware, in SEC. 4405. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY VEHICLES MANUFACTURING INCENTIVE PROGRAM, there are major incentives to Detroit carved into this bill that would have given Detroit tens of billions of dollars to help automakers to help retrofit cars and trucks…and it sounds like this was not only something completely overlooked in the bill but also not highlighted as a key benefit in the Bill. I’ll just add to this that a leaked memo underscored the political maneuvering being done by the Republican party in order to keep this Bill from going anywhere under the current administration, but I’m certain that, with the changing of political tides, we’ll certainly see a bill of this nature, in some form, signed into law within the next administration, regardless of who wins, because they’ll certainly be more interested in a serious climate policy that the one we’ve got now has proven to be. And according to Deron Lovaas, from NRDC, currently a senior energy analyst and the vehicles campaign director for NRDC, the good news is that everyone pretty much assumed this was going to be a ‘dry run’ before the real deal hits the debate floor in this next administration.

“Dry run” aside, it seems that the debate missed the Bill’s positive points entirely, boiling down instead to how much it would increase gas prices…with industry saying one thing, the DOE saying another, and the long term question about getting off this resource remaining unanswered. As Lovaas correctly notes, “I think if people knew just how effective this would be, it would have faced a different reception,” referencing the section of the Bill that was intended to incentivize Detroit.

While it’s obviously a very hard time to talk about the word ‘climate’ in DC and get anywhere these days, the Senate completely missed the fact that the word ‘energy’ is a pretty hot topic at least out in these parts..as it is elsewhere…so of course had they been smart, now would have been the ideal time to frankly highlight and underscore the benefits of the climate bill, ESPECIALLY since we can use this election time, and tax payers’ dollars, with both parties vying for the top political seat, to pound out what needs to be done on this topic over the course of what will be weeks of debate between Obama and McCain. And what a perfect topic to debate.

To quote Steve Mufson, “The climate change bill – proposed by Sens. John Warner (R-Vir.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and amended by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) – tries to cover almost all the political bases. It proposes big tax cuts to help the poor pay for higher energy prices that would come out of the legislation. It allocates far fewer emission permits than Europe does in its system, but the allocations are still substantial. It also takes a novel approach to state governments, many of which have already designed their own systems. Rather than force states to join a federal system, the bill provides scores of billions of dollars of incentives to entice states into joining the national system.” Source

NRDC’s Lovaas told me that NRDC wants to make sure that people clearly understand that this climate bill, and any cap and trade bill for dealing with global warming pollution, would at least be a step in the right direction of getting us off oil. “The analysis we’ve done shows that, in fact, over time, a cap on global warming pollution drops that pollution and effectively moves us off oil. And that’s the message we want people to understand.”

Innovation clearly scares some people. Perhaps the word I should use is ‘change’. No one likes change. But everyone sure seems to have a good time once they’ve reaped the benefits of [the] change…and I have to say, folks…I just can’t seen anything but upside with the changes we’re looking at. I just wish all those ‘nay’ votes in DC would sit and think and realize that in a relatively few short years, oil just simply won’t be used much to power our homes, or cars and trucks and vans and such, and we should be worrying a lot less about the price of gas for our cars now than how to transition FAST to not using oil at all.

Happy Friday to all.

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