ADDRESSING GLOBAL warming requires a dramatic departure from business, and politics, as usual. Whether our elected representatives can continue the process of rising to this most fundamental challenge is far from clear - and time is running out.
Signals from the White House are encouraging. President Obama has appointed prominent scientists, deeply steeped in climate science, to key posts.
And Congress is on the move. The American Clean Energy and Security Act is the first legislation seriously addressing global warming pollution to ever pass the House - a step that required a massive effort. New Englanders owe our hometown climate champion, Representative Edward Markey, thanks and congratulations.
But the details of the bill matter - and some of those details are ugly. When first introduced, the bill plotted a course consistent with what science tells us is needed to avoid catastrophe: a course toward lower emissions and a new clean economy. But legislators doing the bidding of coal interests (mining companies and power plant owners), big agribusiness, and their allies held the bill hostage, extracting major concessions in exchange for support - damaging and diluting the bill.
Climate protection advocates and businesspeople trying to build a new economy around clean energy are focused on fixing these problems. Some key issues are:
The emissions cap in the cap-and-trade portion of the bill must truly limit emissions, decreasing over time. At this point it is really no cap at all. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the revised bill would not require any emissions reductions until after 2020. By contrast, sound science tells us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 as a key step toward stabilizing our climate. Emissions have increased significantly since 1990 and we must cut them nearly 40 percent from current levels by 2020 in order to be on track for meeting our 2050 target. The revised bill - with a weakened cap and heavy reliance on dubious offsets - will not get us there.
The revised bill gives away most of the rights to pollute - the allowances at the heart of cap and trade. As Obama accurately pointed out in February, “If you’re giving away carbon permits for free, then basically you’re not really pricing the thing and it doesn’t work - or people can game the system in so many ways that it’s not creating the incentive structures that we’re looking for.’’
Here in the Northeast we have learned that auctioning allowances and investing the auction proceeds in energy efficiency reduces both utility bills and pollution. Unfortunately, the revised bill gives allowances to coal plant owners, creating the largest cash giveaway to coal plants in history. It’s a giveaway all the more egregious because the revised bill fails to limit the number of dirty new coal-fired power plants that can be built between now and 2015. We need to shut down coal plants, not pay them to pollute.
The bill also provides windfalls to big agriculture - including undermining existing laws regarding greenhouse gas emissions associated with ethanol.
Although the bill would establish a national requirement that a rising percentage of electricity come from renewable sources (as states in New England do), the version in the bill is weaker than existing state standards and will not spur development of new projects. A separate, powerful Energy Efficiency Resource Standard was also eliminated during the revision process. Instead, a weaker version was consolidated into the renewable energy standard. Efficiency is entirely different from renewable energy, and the revised bill errs when it considers these distinct clean energy tools to be interchangeable.
The bill has created deserved excitement, even more so since it passed the House. Critical provisions promoting investment in clean energy technology, like strong building codes and appliance standards, must be preserved as the bill moves forward. And the fundamental ideas behind the bill are sound.
The bill needs to be returned to full strength by restoring a real cap and bulking up the tools to foster renewable energy and efficiency - fixing the flaws inflicted during the legislative process. A restored bill can put us on a path toward climate protection and lay the foundation for a new economy.
John Kassel is president of the Conservation Law Foundation. 
