Policy & Legislation
NY Senate's Bipartisan Vote Jump-starts $5B Green Jobs/Bldg Plan
Published September 15, 2009 @ 06:23PM PT
Start spreading the news: A newly-passed law in New York State will use the proceeds from auctions of carbon emissions credits to fund a massive statewide weatherization-and-green-jobs-creation program.
And a Republican state senator bucked the party line to help pass the bill.
Last Friday, the State Senate passed Green Job/Green New York Act. The legislation will channel $112 million in proceeds from auctioning carbon emissions credits (at the market created via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) into starting up a $5 billion energy-efficiency program -- which will lower energy costs for New York households, cut the state's greenhouse gas pollution levels, and create thousands of jobs.
Republican State Sen. Thomas Morahan co-sponsored the bill with Democratic colleague Darrel Aubertine. Morahan's support led to a resoundingly bipartisan vote to pass the bill.
Breaking: Reid says climate bill may wait until 2010
Published September 15, 2009 @ 02:58PM PT
Climate policy reform may be delayed until 2010 while the Senate wrestles with other issues. E&ENews PM ($ req'd) is reporting,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today said the Senate may not act on comprehensive energy and climate change legislation until next year, given the chamber's busy fall schedule.
Speaking to reporters about the possibility of taking up the bill this fall, Reid said the Senate must first finish work on health care and regulatory reform.
"So, you know, we are going to have a busy, busy time the rest of this year," Reid said. "And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year. We still have next year to complete things if we have to."
...Reid also downplayed but did not rule out the possibility that Democrats could decide to move the energy piece separately from the climate change portion.
"That was an initial discussion that we had many, many months ago," Reid said. "We've focused on what the House has done, and that is do it all in one package. But we have -- that's a bridge that's still a long ways away."
UPDATE, 6:09 PM ET
It's a trifecta of downbeat climate policy news today. In addition to the late breaking quotes from Senator Reid:
Lincoln: No Support For House Climate Bill: Newly installed Senate Agriculture Chair Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) told the National Cattlemen's Beef Association that she does not support the House climate and energy bill, reports the National Journal ($ req'd), because of the burdens it would place on her state, "and rural and poor America in general." Her stated focus is on how the bill's measures might affect food prices. The article offers no contrasting opinions or fact-checking on Senator Lincoln's claims about the bill.
US planning to weaken Copenhagen climate deal, Europe warns: Significant differences have developed between Europe and the Obama administration "over the structure of a new worldwide treaty on global warming," David Adams of the Guardian (UK) reported today. "Sources on the European side say the US approach could undermine the new treaty and weaken the world's ability to cut carbon emissions."
According to Adams, the split centers on how greenhouse gas reduction targets would would be counted in the successor to the Kyoto protocol climate agreement. Europe wants to retain the system set up under Kyoto; the Obama administration has said it wants to throw nearly all of those structures away "and replace it with a system of its own design."
Throwing out Kyoto's precedents would probably mean years of new negotiations toward a new climate change agreement.
Despite Mixed Signals on Climate, the Time for Action Is Now
Published September 11, 2009 @ 06:42PM PT
Above: "Photo petition" student climate action, courtesy of It's Getting Hot in Here: Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement
President Obama has signaled that national health care should take precedence over climate change. But his first major speech to the UN, later this month, will be on global warming.
Following the death of Ted Kennedy a few weeks ago, Senators John Kerry and Barabara Boxer delayed the introduction of a climate bill in the Senate. It's now looking increasingly unlikely that the Senate will pass a bill at all this year, although Boxer still maintains that she plans to introduce one in early October.
With all these mixed signals coming from our elected representatives, where does that leave the movement to stop climate change?
Fatalistic Friday: 'We're waiting for our climate speech, Mr. President', major Arctic melt, more
Published September 11, 2009 @ 02:37PM PT
Above: Pacific walrus swimming to shore at an Alaskan beach. The Obama administration may give the species special protections under the Endangered Species Act, because it is losing critical habitat to global warming. Source: US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Presented for your amusement: our semi-regular horse pill of bad news about climate change. Look out -- there's a signpost up ahead that reads...Fatalistic Friday.
Climate Activists Wait for an Obama Speech to Call Their Own: As President Obama delivered his health care speech this week, climate change activists said they were waiting patiently for a similar rhetorical moment. While there is broad acceptance about the president's decision to push global warming to the back burner for now, Obama needs to grant climate change equal attention on prime-time television in coming months, they say.
With less than 100 days until the Copenhagen talks begin, time is running out. "I don't have a problem with him keeping the climate powder dry for now," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, which is pushing to strengthen global warming legislation that passed the House in June. "But, ultimately, it may take a big goosing from the White House to achieve some resolution in the Congress." (ClimateWire)
Arctic ice meltdown greater than average again in 2009: The Arctic sea ice has retreated to the third-lowest level in recorded history -- the fourth time in the past five years that the annual summer meltdown has been far greater than average. The ice has already diminished this year to less than 5.3 million square kilometres, with a week or two of melting left to go. The all-time biggest retreat was recorded in 2007 at 4.13 million square kilometres, and the 2008 retreat fell just short of that record. (CanWest News Service)
Effects of Arctic warming seen as widespread: The Arctic Circle has been warming faster than other latitudes. And the impacts are showing on the region's plants, birds, animals and insects. "The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," Eric Post, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University, said in a statement. (Associated Press)
House Investigation Turns Up Forged Letter #14 Against Climate Bill
Published September 10, 2009 @ 06:11PM PT
Above: In this TV ad, funded by the VoteVets.org PAC, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans ask the Senate to pass the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill.
House investigators have discovered another forged letter sent to a Virginia representative in June, urging him to vote against the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill.
As The Washington Post reports, this brings the total number of fakes up to 14 so far -- all coming from Bonner & Associates, the PR firm that was working for the pro-coal lobby group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity in the run-up to the House vote.
Like the previous baker's dozen, this letter was made to look as if it were from a grassroots community organization. This time, rather than evoke sympathy for the concerns of the aging, or people of color, this letter pulled patriotic heartstrings, by appearing to come from a local American Legion post.
The letter lauded the continued use of coal-fired energy, and urged Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) to vote against the Waxman-Markey bill.
Second Firm Exits Coal Group That Opposes Climate Bill
Published September 09, 2009 @ 07:30PM PT
Is the coal industry's anti-climate action front group losing steam?
Five weeks ago, news broke that a PR firm hired by one of the most prominent coal lobby groups, the "American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy," had sent forged letters to Congress in opposition to the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate action bill. The letters were made to look as if they were from community groups. Rep. Ed. Markey has since spearheaded a House investigation into the letters, uncovering several more fakes.
A week ago, Duke Energy announced that it had left ACCCE, because powerful members of the pro-coal group oppose the climate legislation, which Duke supports.
Today another company has fled the ACCCE embrace: Alstom Power, a French company that manufactures power plant parts, and works on carbon sequestration.
WSJ: "Waxman-Markey's benefits far outweigh costs"
Published September 08, 2009 @ 02:14PM PT
A non-partisan new analysis of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill finds that it will have economic benefits that will be worth at least twice as much, if not more, than what it will cost.
“From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet,” concludes "The Other Side of the Coin", which was produced by the NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
How did the authors tote up the legislation's economic benefits?
As Keith Johnson of the WSJ's Environmental Capital blog writes today, the paper examines the "social cost of carbon:" what a ton of carbon is worth to our society when it isn't in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change's effects on the environment, the economy, public health, and national security.
Multiple federal agencies have accepted the estimate that a ton of carbon-not-emitted is worth about $19.
So using the bill's targets for how many tons of atmospheric carbon it will avert over the next forty years, the NYU Law analysts calculated that Waxman-Markey would be worth around $1.5 trillion on average.
Since bill's costs will add up to around $660 billion, that is a two-to-one return on the dollar. And this, according to the authors, is a conservative estimate, partly because it does not factor in many ancillary social benefits of cutting greenhouse gas pollution, such as "reduced ocean acidification, increased forest preservation, and reductions in local air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter."
