Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
How to Make Cap-and-Trade Into a Bad Joke
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Via Gristmill,
I see that Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D–NM), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources committee, has decided to preemptively surrender on global warming:
Bingaman said any Congressionally developed system capping and trading emissions probably will include carbon allowances given to polluters like cement factories and coal-burning power plants, along with permits that are sold.
Auctioning 100 percent of the permits would essentially make polluters pay quickly for emissions. In the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, emissions permits were given away to polluters at first. This led to a glut of permits and windfall profits for some emitters.
….”I think it’s unlikely we will pass a cap-and-trade bill with 100 percent auction,” Bingaman told reporters at the Platts Energy Podium. He said such a system has the risk of substantially increasing the burden on some utilities and major emitters.
There are lots of bells and whistles that you can add to a cap-and-trade plan: safety valves, circuit breakers, banking, offsets, and other buzzwords by the truckload. Some are mostly good (banking), some are mostly bad (offsets), and some are in between (safety valves and circuit breakers). All of them are things we should care about getting right, but they’re also things where, inevitably, we’re going to have to compromise.
Auctioning permits is different. This is the one thing that ought to be a deal-breaker in any cap-and-trade plan.
(6 March 2009)
Tough odds facing bill to impose carbon tax
John M. Broder, International Herald Tribune
Representative John Larson has embarked again on his lonely quest to enact a national tax on carbon dioxide emissions. His idea is to set a modest price on a ton of emissions, gradually increasing it each year until the desired reduction in heat-trapping-gas pollution is achieved.
Under the bill he introduced last week, virtually all the revenues from the tax would be returned to the public in lower payroll taxes.
“The American people want us to level with them,” Larson, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the House leadership, said in an interview. “We create price certainty without any new bureaucracies or complicated auction schemes.”
Many economists and academics, as well as a handful of Larson’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle and perhaps a few White House officials, if secretly, agree that a carbon tax is a simpler and more effective means of tackling global warming than the complex cap-and-trade scheme embraced by the Obama administration and most Democratic leaders in Congress.
(8 March 2009)
Related from UK Times: The Obama permits plan won’t work.
Moderate Dems present challenge for renewable energy plan
Ben Geman, Greenwire via NY Times
Senate backers of a renewable electricity standard are closer than ever to the 60 votes needed to pass the long-stymied plan, but reaching the magic filibuster-proof number is proving to be no easy task.
A nationwide renewables standard, or RES, is a longstanding pillar of Democratic energy plans that requires utilities to supply escalating amounts of power from sources such as wind and solar.
With President Obama in the White House and stronger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, enactment of a standard has become more likely but remains far from certain. The Senate magic number of 60 votes, enough to get cloture and bypass a potential filibuster, remain the key hurdle.
(5 March 2009)
