Earth Equity News

Climate Loopholes. Editorial, NYTimes, July 22, 2009. "The House's approval of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill earlier this month was a remarkable political achievement and an important beginning to the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But in all the last-minute wheeling and dealing, the House bill acquired two big loopholes that the Senate must close. The first loophole involves coal-fired power plants... The bill does not impose any performance standards on existing power plants. And it explicitly removes these plants from the reach of the Clean Air Act. This is a mistake. The overall cap on industrial emissions will not be fully effective for a long time, and, meanwhile, the government should be able to impose lower-emissions requirements on the older, dirtiest plants... The second loophole involves the tricky matter of offsets... Academic studies have found that many of the offsets purchased by industrialized countries under the Kyoto treaty turned out to be bogus or produced far less reductions than advertised. This is a very real danger with some of the offsets in the House bill... Offsets must be real and verifiable, or the integrity of the entire scheme is at risk... There are risks here. The Senate has already rejected much weaker bills. But the political climate is more favorable now than it has ever been, and Senate Democrats should not settle for half-measures." [Editors Note: Arguably the Waxman-Markey bill is weaker still than the Lieberman-Warner bill, which the Senate rejected in 2008.]