Will House GOP Get Serious on Energy, Climate?

by Emily Gertz

Published April 29, 2009 @ 03:35PM PT

 

 

Newt Gingrich, onetime GOP influencer, has a cautionary tale he likes to tell about cap-and-trade controls on carbon dioxide pollution.  It's a "famous" story, the former House speaker has claimed, about a cement factory that fled the European Union carbon market for a deregulated zone in the developing world.  

The inference is that US jobs will vanish if the country puts a price on carbon. The problem is that the story seems to be untrue.

As Pete Altman notes on Switchboard, the climate and energy blog of the enviro-advocacy group NRDC, here's how the story goes, in this case taken from Mr. Gingrich's book "Drill Here, Drill Now":

 ... if you have [a] single country adopt carbon trading what you will almost virtually guarantee is that the jobs and the industries will go offshore. And there's a fairly famous case of a cement factory in Belgium that the minute they adopted carbon trading they moved the whole factory to Morocco, and it actually pollutes more in Morocco, which doesn't have any air control standards, than it was polluting in Belgium. So, the Belgians lost the jobs, the plant increased the pollution. I'm not sure that's a win-win strategy.

"This story works because it appears to illustrate a common concern with enacting a climate policy here in the U.S.," writes Pete. "That's not an outlandish concern, but ... for a case that is supposed to be 'fairly famous,' it's awfully hard to find any information on it. To be more precise, we can't find any evidence that it actually happened."

In fact, according to Switchboard, Mr. Gingrich may have conflated the story from other thrilling moments from the past few year of European Union concrete manufacturing; however, none of them involve a concrete factory fleeing the EU due to the cost of carbon.  Read the whole thing.

(Pete also mentions that there are proposed protections against this kind of job flight in Title IV, Subtitle A of the Waxman-Markey bill.)

Is this just a typical exaggeration by a politico to underscore a dearly-held policy position?  Or is it another lie of Newt?  Because Mr. Gingrich referred to this story again when he appeared during House hearings on energy and climate legislation last week -- at the same hearing where Rep. Henry Waxman called him out for bolstering his arguments against cap-and-trade with  discredited figures on how much putting a price on carbon pollution will cost the average household.

My goal here is not to make the shocking point that politicians stretch the truth, or suggest that one party has a lock on this sort of flim-flammery storytelling.  

It's to note something that needs saying clearly now and then: With so much of the nation's health, prosperity, food and water supplies, and even national security wrapped up in stabilizing the climate within the next 10-15 years, we need to get our next steps as right as possible.  We need to learn from the European Union's experiences with its carbon market, which has been a mixed success.  We need to study the best solutions other nations have developed, and how they can help us hustle our transition into a low-carbon economy.

 Substantive discussion and debate on carbon markets and clean energy would help.  Since the House GOP has been occupied with attempted smears, disinformation and contrarian cranks in the debate on energy and climate legislation, a lot will depend upon how the Democrats sort out their own considerable spectrum of differences on the bill.

Last fall's election demonstrated that most of the electorate no longer trusts the Republican Party to have its best interests at heart. With so little time to turn around the worst of global warming, these latest low-content performances offer no evidence that the House GOP has gotten the message.

 

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Image:  "Wildfires burned along the South Carolina coastline on April 22-23, 2009, leaping over a highway and heading for a heavily populated area in North Myrtle Beach...[B]y April 23, the fires had destroyed more than 40 homes and damaged another 100, and had forced more than 2,500 people to evacuate ... Wildfires typically destroy roughly 35 homes in any one year in South Carolina, a local official told the New York Times.  Encouraged by low humidity and winds of 40 kilometers (25 miles) per hour, the April 2009 fire burned a record number of homes in just 24 hours. As of the morning of April 23, 2009, the fires were less than 10 percent contained."  Source: NASA Earth Observatory