Memo to President Obama: Climate Change Policy Recommendations

(Cross-posted from “It’s Getting Hot In Here”)
As a final assignment for a climate course that I am in, I had the opportunity to write a memo to president Obama outlining what his climate goal should be and what policies/strategies he would use to reach those goals.

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Senate Climate Bill Released: The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act

Senator John Kerry and Senator Barbara Boxer released the Senate version of ACES (the House climate bill) today.

You can read the summary as well as the full text on Senator John Kerry’s website: http://kerry.senate.gov/cleanenergyjobsandamericanpower/intro.cfm.

• Overview
• Summary
• Section by Section Summary
• Full text of the bill

Unfortunately, CEJAPA or CEJAP doesn’t have the same ring to it that ACES did.

Plans B and C: EPA regulation and the federal common law

As the Senate continues to wrestle with healthcare reform, some speculation has been flying around that the climate change bill might not make it out this session. So, what would happen if Congress doesn’t pass a climate change bill this year? Will the fossil-fuel polluters be free to run amok?

Maybe not! You may have heard that the EPA now has the legal authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. David Roberts at Grist wrote a great explainer on the situation: the aptly-titled “Everything you always wanted to know about EPA greenhouse gas regulations, but were afraid to ask”. So in fact, EPA could regulate CO2 without Congress passing a climate bill — it would just take some really tough rule-making on the agency’s part, which would likely be challenged in court by carbon-intensive industries. However, one potential upshot that Roberts points out is that EPA regulation could mean relatively painless integration of the various existing regional cap-and-trade schemes — something the House climate bill doesn’t account for.

What if EPA regulations don’t pan out? Well, the Second Circuit has stepped into the breach by remanding Connecticut v. AEP, a nuisance suit brought by eight states and New York City, along with NRDC, the Open Society Institute, Audubon Society of New Hampshire, and others. The plaintiffs claimed that the defendant power companies contributed CO2 emissions causing global warming, which constitutes a public nuisance causing myriad injuries and expected injuries (ranging from reduced snowpack in California’s mountains to salinization of marshes and water supplies.) Today, the Second Circuit held that the plaintiffs could bring their claim “unless and until the legislative and executive branches actually regulate that pollution, either under the existing Clean Air Act or the comprehensive new energy and climate legislation bending in Congress,” as David Doniger, policy director of NRDC, explains in his great blog post on the case and what the remand means.

Doniger’s post also points out the disheartening news that Senator Murkowski of Alaska intends to introduce an amendment to prevent EPA from regulating carbon — see how it comes back in a circle? Senator Murkowski will try to add her amendment to the Interior and EPA appropriations bill; thus, EPA’s funding would be conditioned on its not regulating CO2, although Murkowski’s amendment does allow for continued regulation of CO2 from cars. (Note that essentially, this preemptively creates the same “loophole” that I’ve blogged about here before – a “loophole” that I think is less problematic in the context of an actual cap-and-trade statute.) The Senator says she’s offering the amendment to allow Congress the appropriate “breathing space” to properly consider climate change legislation.

But others say that EPA’s authority to regulate GHGs – and now, the people’s right to bring nuisance claims based on global warming – are just what’s needed to get Congress to pass a strong climate change bill.

How the Climate Bill can help protect our waters.

When you try to picture a world where a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions is perfectly implemented, you probably envision cleaner skies, or an end to devastating mountaintop removal coal mining. But as Nancy Stoner at the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, the House climate bill can have major beneficial effects on our beaches and oceans through various requirements that will help reduce extreme storm events. Fewer storm events will also help water quality in all of our nation’s waterways by reducing stormwater, which carries pollutants, sediment, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and in many communities with combined sewer systems, untreated sewage straight into our rivers, bays and oceans. Nancy Stoner highlights three key ways the climate bill will help protect beaches:

1. It will set firm limits on global warming pollution, which will help minimize the impacts of climate change, including storm events.
2. It calls for protecting the wetlands, coastal dunes, and other natural systems that buffer us from storms and help filter out pollutants in stormwater.
3. It offers funding for water utilities and sewage treatment plants to update their storm drains and make their infrastructure more resilient to climate change.

Another critical effect of global warming is ocean acidification. The Conservation Law Foundation does a great job explaining this phenomenon and how it will affect the American industries that depend on marine resources that depend on healthy ocean waters. Here in Maryland, agencies are struggling to sustainably manage the depleted populations of oyster and crab fisheries already severely stressed by pollution and other factors. Climate change will further stress fish and shellfish populations, constituting an economic threat for all the people whose jobs depend on these natural resources. However, a strong climate bill like ACES can help protect American fisheries, waters, and local jobs.

Greetings from the DC Action Factory tent city!

Cross posted from ActionFactoryDC.blogspot.com, post by Kalen Pruss

We are just hours into our 26 hour tent city marathon. We set-up our camp with relative ease, had a not unpleasant chat with the police, and are just now settling down for the long haul. It is quite literally starting to heat up, and despite the cops mandating that we dismantle our overhead tarps, we are doing our best to keep cool. As uncouth as it sounds, at least our project has an end date. For millions of climate refugees across the globe, drought, flooding, disease, or famine make harsh conditions a permanent reality.

It is important, then, that we stand in solidarity with these many millions, and bring their voices to the policy-makers whose decisions will ultimately shape their future. Such action is desperately needed, yet our leaders typically fail in recognizing climate refugees altogether. In high-level talks regarding climate refugees, decision-makers find themselves bogged down in determining even the basic definition of climate refugees (see Morgan’s post from last night). It appears that after so much politicking over semantics, world leaders are simply too exhausted to take real steps toward aiding these involuntary migrants.
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There is no grandfathering.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a great post today arguing against the contention that the climate bill contains a gaping loophole for old coal plants. This is the same conclusion I reached in a previous post, so it’s gratifying for me to see that my interpretation wasn’t completely off-base. Today’s Climate Progress post is in response to a piece written by the leaders of the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and Environmental Integrity Project which claims that the climate bill gives old coal plants “a free pass to continue business as usual — without making any serious reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide for 15 years or more.” In response, Romm explains how ACES/ACELA in fact would result in those very same old coal plants to bear the brunt of the emissions reductions required under the shrinking cap.

In fact, it seems like Pope, Van Noppen and Schaeffer’s concerns are with the mechanism of cap-and-trade and its effectiveness:

Instead of assuring that the oldest, least efficient, and most polluting plants are phased out, Waxman-Markey leaves that up to the cap-and-trade system created by the bill.

As Romm makes clear, the cap-and-trade system is designed to cause the phasing out of those plants. They don’t come out and say it, but it seems like Pope, Van Noppen and Schaeffer would prefer a command-and-control solution — which might be more effective at combating global warming, but is undoubtedly politically unfeasible in terms of passing legislation.

Romm manages to in two sentences sum up how the climate bill works and why it should be passed:

In the real world the much-maligned House climate and clean energy bill would do what clean energy and climate advocates have been demanding for decades: It would set up the framework to allow low-carbon technologies to compete against fairly — and thus steadily replace — existing coal at the lowest possible cost.

Rep. Waxman on the Daily Show

Jon Stewart interviewed Rep. Henry Waxman on the Daily Show on Tuesday. Waxman is the chair of the House Committee on Energy an Commerce and was the mind behind the House version of the cap and trade bill. He’s also the person pushing the health care bill through the House.

The interview ended up being mostly about the health care reform bill, but I wanted to post it here anyway.

I was a little disappointed with Waxman’s answers. His answers sounded very canned, as though he were answering questions from the press.

Rep. Markey: Obama needs to make the case for ACES in prime time

The Wonk Room also has a brief summary and transcript of remarks by Rep. Markey and Secretary of Energy Chu speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Fear of carbon markets is bipartisan.

A couple weeks ago, Senator Dorgan (D-ND) caused a small kerfuffle in the blogosphere by stating his opposition to a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. In an op-ed published in the Bismarck Tribune, Senator Dorgan argued that creating carbon markets is a bad idea because of the possibility of speculation and exploitative trading:

I know the Wall Street crowd can’t wait to sink their teeth into a new trillion-dollar trading market in which hedge funds and investment banks would trade and speculate on carbon credits and securities. In no time they’ll create derivatives, swaps and more in that new market. In fact, most of the investment banks have already created carbon trading departments. They are ready to go. I’m not.

Unless he proposes abolishing all markets out of fear of market speculation, Dorgan’s argument is, of course, unsupportable. Nobel economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained that the problem is inherent to markets, not carbon emissions allowances:

For example, the fact that wheat is traded means that there’s also a wheat futures market; and because wheat can be stored, futures prices affect spot prices.

So, should fear of speculation lead us to ban trading in wheat? Nobody would say that. Yes, sometimes speculators will get it wrong — but the advantages of having a wheat market vastly overshadow the possible harm that may sometimes come from speculation.

As Joe Romm makes plain, the Waxman-Markey bill already contains provisions against carbon speculation, including lodging regulatory oversight with both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC) and explicitly criminalizing fraud and manipulation in carbon markets. Permit bidders are also required to publicly disclose information and are limited to purchasing no more than 5% of permits on the market.

Further, steps have already been taken in the Senate towards carbon market oversight. Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Snowe (R-ME) have introduced a bill to regulate carbon markets under the CFTC: the Carbon Market Oversight Act of 2009 (S. 1399). There are more details on the CMOA at Global Climate Law Blog.

But the unsubstantiated fears of taking action don’t end there! On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held hearings on the theme of “Climate Change and National Security,” where Senator Barrasso (R-WY) expressed his concern that carbon markets could become a source for “funding streams to international organized criminal elements.” (Behold his stirring oratory on YouTube.)
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Juliet Eilperin and the Politics of Climate Change

Courtesy of the Nation, the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin shares her thoughts on the outlook of the climate bill. She draws an interesting comparison to the Clean Air Act and how, after the law’s passage, Congress was able to strengthen its initially weak targets by improving upon its framework.