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The War Over Waxman-Markey
Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones
Pass a flawed climate bill now, or wait for a better one? Environmentalists duke it out.
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A long-awaited vote on the Waxman-Markey climate bill, expected this week or early next month, has environmentalists teetering at the edge of existential crisis. Some believe the bill is so deeply flawed it might actually make matters worse; disillusionment with the bill is causing fierce recriminations within the environmental movement and has led to a knockdown, drag-out fight within the Sierra Club.
“This situation represents much more than just a normal legislative fight,” says former Sierra Club president Larry Fahn, who as a current board member has argued that the bill has been watered down to the point of being unsalvageable. “It’s about the core of what we’re now fighting for, and who we are.”
The split encompasses more than predictable ideological divides. Debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus this bill’s cap-and-trade model has mostly given way to concerns about whether the legislation, sponsored by representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), lines the pockets of polluters with little to show for it. The most it would cut carbon emissions by 2020 is 17 percent below 1990 levels, nowhere near the 25 to 40 percent reduction sought by scientists and international climate negotiators. The Sierra Club has withheld its endorsement in hopes of improving the bill before a final vote—it wants to prevent polluters from receiving tradable emissions permits for free, preserve the EPA’s authority to independently regulate carbon, and better fund energy efficiency and clean energy—but Fahn and other environmentalists are skeptical that lawmakers will listen. “From my perspective,” he says, “the prospects of strengthening it to where we’d want to support the ultimate version are growing slim.”
Many environmentalists blame Waxman-Markey’s flaws on the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of industry and moderate environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council that, during the last years of the Bush administration, quietly hammered out what has become the bill’s framework.
(22 June 2009)
Related:
Waxman-Markey: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Mother Jones) – nice summary
Myth: Waxman-Markey gives away 85 percent of allowances to polluters a defense of Waxman-Markey by Grist’s David Roberts.
The War Against the ‘War on Drugs’
Sasha Abramsky, The Nation
As California goes, so goes the nation.
If that old adage still holds true, then the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades. For the most populous state in the union is on the verge of insolvency–partly because it didn’t set aside a rainy-day fund during the boom years; partly because its voters recently rejected a series of initiatives that would have allowed a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to help stabilize the state’s finances during the downturn; partly because it has spent the past quarter-century funneling tens of billions of dollars into an out-of-control correctional system. Now, as California’s politicians contemplate emergency cuts to deal with a $24 billion hole in the state budget, old certainties are crumbling.
The state with the toughest three-strikes law in the land and a prison population of more than 150,000 is facing the real possibility of having to release tens of thousands of inmates early in order to pare its $10 billion annual correctional budget. At the same time, an increasing number of the state’s political figures are challenging the basic tenets of the “war on drugs,” the culprit most responsible for the spike in prison populations over the past thirty years; they argue that the country’s harsh drug policies are not financially viable and no longer command majority support among the voting public.
Similar stories are unfolding around the country
(17 June 2009)
Opposition to the food safety bills
Scaredhuman, DailyKos
Henry Waxman’s betrayal of our existence – HR 2749
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It seems that all the worst of the “food safety” bills have been rolled into one Frankenstein version that Henry Waxman as associated with drafting – HR 2749. Now, for some reason, ithey have passed it off to Dingell who already had another “food safety” bill, HR 759, which covers tracing (NAIS) and globalization of food.
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/hr-2749-totalitarian-control…
HR 2749, if one looks closely, is fascist. And all the things that people were criticizing the other bills such as HR 875 for – all denied by DeLauro and FWW – turn out to be not only true but worse than the worse that was reported.
For those who want to see a bit of what Waxman will would do to this country, here are some of the provisions, which can be found at FOOD FREEDOM.
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/hr-2749-totalitarian-control…
Alarming Provisions:
Some of the more alarming provisions in the bill are:
* HR 2749 would impose an annual registration fee of $500 on any “facility” that holds, processes, or manufactures food. [isn’t this every home in the US, every garden?] Although “farms” are exempt, the agency has defined “farm” narrowly. [What is the definition?] And people making foods such as lacto-fermented vegetables, cheeses, or breads would be required to register and pay the fee, which could drive beginning and small producers out of business during difficult economic times. [Yes. There are laws against this corporate-size-destroys-the-little-guy policy, aren’t there? Are home bread or cheese or lacto-fermented vegetable makers who make for their own families included in this?]
(17 June 2009)
A sample of some of the submissions we’ve been getting about new food legislation. I would really appreciate good journalism on the subject. The mainstream media is clueless, the critics conspiracy-minded, and the truth hard to find.
For background, see Sharon Astyk’s recent post: Farms as battlegrounds. Significantly, Wendell Bery has taken a strong stand against the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) -BA
From the Ashes of ’69, a River Reborn (Ohio’s Cuyahoga – the “burning river”)
Christopher Maag, New York Times
CLEVELAND — The first time Gene Roberts fell into the Cuyahoga River, he worried he might die. The year was 1963, and the river was still an open sewer for industrial waste. Walking home, Mr. Roberts smelled so bad that his friends ran to stay upwind of him.
Recently, Mr. Roberts returned to the river carrying his fly-fishing rod. In 20 minutes, he caught six smallmouth bass. “It’s a miracle,” said Mr. Roberts, 58. “The river has come back to life.”
Monday is the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, when oil-soaked debris floating on the river’s surface was ignited, most likely by sparks from a passing train.
The fire was extinguished in 30 minutes and caused just $50,000 in damage. But it became a galvanizing symbol for the environmental movement, one of a handful of disasters that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and to the passage of the Clean Water Act.
(20 June 2009)
The incident of the fire on the Cuyahoga was commemmorated in the title of Cleveland’s underground newspaper in the 70s, “The Burning River Oracle.” How times have changed. -BA
Destroying Levees in a State Usually Clamoring for Them
Cornelia Dean, New York Times
In the 1960s, a group of businessmen bought 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland along the Ouachita River in northern Louisiana and built miles of levee around it. They bulldozed its oak and cypress trees and, when the land dried out, turned it into a soybean farm.
Now two brothers who grew up nearby are undoing all that work. In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804.
… The idea goes against the grain in Louisiana, where people have battled river flooding since colonial days. European settlers were often required to build levees to establish homesteading claims; in recent decades, landowners built levees to create farmland by the hundreds of thousands of acres. Hurricane Katrina brought a clamor for more and stronger levees to protect people and buildings farther south.
Yet at the same time, there is a growing awareness that Louisiana’s levees have exacted a huge environmental cost. Inland, cypress forests and wetlands crucial for migrating waterfowl have vanished; in southern Louisiana, coastal marshes deprived of regular infusions of sediment-rich river water have yielded by the mile to an encroaching Gulf of Mexico. Some scientists have suggested opening levees south of New Orleans so the Mississippi River can flow normally into the swamps.
(19 June 2009)
An example of retreating from expensive, environmentally damaging infrastructure. Kurt Cobb points out the problem of declining capital investment in Green shoots: An alternative view. This article points out the opportunity. -BA
