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"Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod, said today: “If this goes down, it shows we can’t govern.” Those are pretty high stakes."
Why would you say such a thing?
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"The Ways and Means Committee's proposed bill language would virtually require that the president impose an import tariff on any country that fails to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions."
Waxman-Markey and the potential for a trade war.
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"Since the Waxman-Markey bill left the Energy and Commerce committee, yet another fleet of industry lobbysists has weakened the bill even more, and further widened the gap between what Waxman-Markey does and what science demands. As a result, Greenpeace opposes this bill in its current form. We are calling upon Congress to vote against this bill unless substantial measures are taken to strengthen it. Despite President Obama’s assurance that he would enact strong, science-based legislation, we are now watching him put his full support behind a bill that chooses politics over science, elevates industry interests over national interest, and shows the significant limitations of what this Congress believes is possible. "
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"Shortly after purchasing carbon offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange, the Washington Post reported that the emissions reductions were rather illusory. To take just one important example, the House spent $14,500 to pay farmers for carbon-reducing “no-till” farming, even though the practice was started prior to the purchase of the offsets. Farmers might have been motivated to practice no-till farming to reduce fuel use or to qualify for federal soil-conservation funds. By failing to meet the additionality requirement for offsets, the money spent by the House on no-till farming did not result in the intended amount of carbon reductions.
This past February, the House acknowledged the problem with offsets and dropped all plans to purchase more of them, thus abandoning the goal of making its offices carbon neutral. What is troubling, however, is that the House’s proposed cap-and-trade legislation does not fully address the problem with offsets."
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"It is a mistake to believe a firm that is given free permits would not increase prices. The value of a permit is determined by its usefulness, not how the firm obtained it. Firms that are allocated free permits face the same production incentives as a firm that pays for them. If emission permits are traded at a price of $20 per ton, the cost of emitting an additional ton of greenhouse gases is $20 for all firms. A firm that has no permit must spend $20 to buy one from another firm; a firm that has a freely allocated permit must give up the opportunity to sell it to another firm for $20. Because emissions are costly, production of carbon-intensive goods still falls and prices of these goods still rise. Although firms that receive free permits have no out-of-pocket permit costs, they still pass along to consumers their opportunity costs, the value of the income they could have earned by selling the permits."
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….and USDOC while you are at it. HAha!
June 26, 2009
