Kerry-Lieberman Bill is Worse than Nothing. Commentary by James Handley, CarbonTax.org, May 14 2010. "Kerry-Lieberman is overwhelmingly a dirty energy subsidy bill with crumbs tossed to 'green' energy. More money (loan guarantee, tax breaks, insurance subsidies) for nukes, 'clean coal,' oil companies, and highways. As documented by Earth Track and Taxpayers For Common Sense, K-L's 'buy everyone off' approach means inducing more demand for energy, which in turn means driving drilling anywhere and everywhere, blowing up more Appalachian mountaintops, and maintaining and extending America's military presence around the world: An addict's frenzy for yet another 'fix' of cheap fossil fuels.
"For the utility sector, K-L relies on a 'cap' with trading and offsets, ceding to traders (i.e. Wall St.) the authority to set carbon prices. In the transportation fuel sector, K-L at least uses a more direct approach of selling allowances at a price established by the utility permit auctions, thus limiting somewhat the problems from trading. (Oil companies don't like volatility, either.) Yet nowhere does the bill set the clear, briskly-rising price on CO2 pollution essential to create incentives for efficiency and low-carbon energy development across the economy. K-L gives offshore drilling the green light. While K-L purports to let states 'veto' drilling in previously-protected waters up to 75 miles off their coasts, it offers them a whopping 37.5% share of revenues generated by offshore oil and gas activity - no strings attached. How many cash-strapped states will resist?... K-L continues the pretense that coal can be made 'clean' through thermodynamically-challenged 'carbon capture and sequestration' by throwing an additional $2 billion/yr on top of the $2.4 billion in the 2009 stimulus package... K-L's vaunted 'cap' is a joke. A 'cap' that adds 2 billion tons of offsets on top of an economy that generated 5.4 billion tons of CO2 last year means that even if the cap tightens a few percent each year, polluters will be able to buy (cheap) offsets instead of making reductions for the next two decades.
"In short, as climate scientist Jim Hansen articulated on Earth Day, we will not address climate and energy security without raising the price of cheap, dirty energy. And if we're serious about a meaningful and effective price, we must return revenue to U.S. workers and families... Cap-and-trade simply cannot achieve emissions reductions large enough to avoid climate catastrophe. The price signal is too murky to trigger the needed shifts to clean energy, and the revenue return is too meager to cover the needed price rises. Nor can it lead to an international price on CO2 pollution supported by trade agreements... Passing K-L will only make this difficult task harder by entrenching traders, offset purveyors and recipients of the bill's dirty energy subsidies."
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