On June 26, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 in favor of HR 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES). Only eight Republicans - we'll call them the "Enlightened Eight" - voted "aye." These Republicans were Mary Bono-Mack (CA-45), Mike Castle (DE-AL), John McHugh (NY-23), Frank LoBiondo (NJ-2), Leonard Lance (NJ-7), Mark Kirk (IL-10), Dave Reichert (WA-8), and Christopher Smith (NJ-4).
Republicans voting for cap and trade in the year of the Tea Party? You'd think that they'd be dumped in the harbor by now. Instead, they're all doing fine. In fact, to date, not a single one of these Republicans has been successfully primaried by the "tea party" (or otherwise). Instead, we have two - Castle and Kirk - running for U.S. Senate, one (McHugh) who was appointed Secretary of the Army by President Obama, and five others - Bono-Mack, LoBiondo, Lance, Reichert, Smith - running for reelection.
Rep. Lance actually was challenged by not one, not two, but three "Tea Party" candidates. One of Lance's opponents, David Larsen, even produced this nifty video, helpfully explaining that "Leonard Lance Loves Cap & Trade Taxes." So, did this work? Did the Tea Partiers overthrow the tyrannical, crypto-liberal Lance? Uh, no. Instead, in the end, Lance received 56% of the vote, easily moving on to November.
Meanwhile, 100 miles or so south on the Jersey Turnpike, Rep. LoBiondo faced two "Tea Party" candidates - Donna Ward and Linda Biamonte - who also attacked on the cap-and-trade issue. According to Biamonte, cap and trade "is insidious and another tax policy... a funneling of money to Goldman Sachs and Al Gore through derivatives creating a carbon bubble like the housing bubble." You'd think that Republican primary voters in the year of the Tea Party would agree with this line of attack. Yet LoBiondo won with 75% of the vote.
Last but not least in New Jersey, Christopher Smith easily turned back a Tea Party challenger - Alan Bateman - by a more than 2:1 margin. Bateman had argued that "Obama knows he can count on Smith to support the United Nations' agenda to redistribute American wealth to foreign countries through international Cap & Trade agreements and other programs that threaten our sovereignty." Apparently, Republican voters in NJ-4 didn't buy that argument.
Across the country in California's 45th District, Mary Bono-Mack won 71% of the vote over Tea Party candidate Clayton Thibodeau on June 8. This, despite Thibodeau attacking Bono-Mack as "the only Republican west of the Mississippi to vote for Cap and Trade." Thibodeau also called cap and trade "frightening," claiming that government could force you to renovate your home or meet requirements before you purchase a home. Thibodeau's scare tactics on cap-and-trade clearly didn't play in CA-45.
Finally, in Washington's 8th Congressional District, incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert has drawn a Tea Party challenger named Ernest Huber, who writes that Cap and Trade "is widely viewed as an attempt at Soviet-style dictatorship using the environmental scam of global warming/climate change... written by the communist Apollo Alliance, which was led by the communist Van Jones, Obama's green jobs czar." We'll see how this argument plays with voters in Washington's 8th Congressional District, but something tells us it's not going to go over any better than in the New Jersey or California primaries.
In sum, it appears that it's quite possible for Republicans to vote for comprehensive, clean energy and climate legislation and live (politically) to tell about it. The proof is in the primaries.
Once upon a time, "cap-and-trade" wasn't an object of conservative Republican opprobrium (e.g., as a "big government cap-and-tax scheme that will destroy our economy and end our way of life as we know it"). Actually, once up on a time, "cap-and-trade" was...wait for it...a conservative Republican idea! That's right, let's head to the "way back machine" and briefly review the Political History of Cap and Trade.
John B. Henry was hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. "I thought he was smoking dope," recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change-an approach being hotly debated in Congress-you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia's Cadillac Mountain.
People now call that system "cap-and-trade." But back then the term of art was "emissions trading," though some people called it "morally bankrupt" or even "a license to kill." For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world-by working with human nature instead of against it.
Despite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy-by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace-emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement...
In the end, the conservative Republican-inspired "cap-and-trade" system for acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide was put into place by Republican President George HW Bush, who "not only accepted the cap, he overruled his advisers' recommendation of an eight million-ton cut in annual acid rain emissions in favor of the ten million-ton cut advocated by environmentalists." And it worked incredibly well, "cost[ing] utilities just $3 billion annually, not $25 billion... [and] by cutting acid rain in half, it also generates an estimated $122 billion a year in benefits from avoided death and illness, healthier lakes and forests, and improved visibility on the Eastern Seaboard."
In short, good things happened when we harnessed the tremendous power of the market to solve environmental problems. Today, the biggest and most pressing of those problems - identified, once again, by a massive amount of scientific research and evidence over several decades - is not acid rain, but global warming. And the proposed solution, once again, is the conservative, market-based "cap-and-trade" system. Strangely, however, it's conservative, market-based Republicans who have morphed into the loudest and most vociferous opponents of "cap-and-trade," while Democrats have become its biggest proponents.
Even stranger, as Climate Progress points out, many Republicans are now opposing - even "demagoguing" - against an idea they once supported! A short list includes: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who once said she supported cap-and-trade because she believed "it offers the opportunity to reduce carbon, at the least cost to society;" Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who once bragged that voting for "cap-and-trade" in Massachusetts was an "important step ... towards improving our environment;" Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who once asserted that cap-and-trade "will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy;" and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who used to believe that we should "set emission standards and let the best technology win." Actually, as Steve Benen at Washington Monthly points out, the McCain-Palin official website in 2008 promised that a McCain administration would "establish...a cap-and-trade system that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
My, how times have changed in less than 2 years.
The point of all this is simple. Cap-and-trade is not some dastardly scheme to destroy the U.S. economy. Cap-and-trade is not radical, either. In fact, cap-and-trade is a tried, true, tested and proven, market-based approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the lowest possible cost. It worked with acid rain, far faster and cheaper than anyone predicted. Why would it be any different with carbon dioxide than sulfur dioxide? And why would Republicans oppose their own idea, after watching it produce one of the biggest environmental victories in U.S. history, on the gravest environmental threat facing our country and our planet? Even more, why would Republicans oppose an idea that -- even if you put aside the issue of global warming -- is still imperative - for urgent economic (e.g., sending $400 billion overseas every year to pay for imported oil) and national security (sending that $400 billion to a lot of countries that aren't our friends, are building nuclear weapons programs, etc.) reasons?
It's hard to think of any good reasons, how about some bad ones? Because, in the end, that's about all the cap-and-trade naysayers have left.
While at Netroots Nation a few weeks back, I had the opportunity to listen in on a panel discussing climate change, Texas' energy future, and energy security featuring Houston Mayor Bill White (you might have also heard he is running for US Senate).
Mayor White gave very measured, political answers. Throughout the panel, never did the words "Cap and Trade" leave his lips, but he did remain skeptical of anyone who claimed to have it all figured out and that their answer would be easy and painless. He also showed legitimate concerns about the impacts of renewable energy mandates done wrong on low-income consumers. As a representative from a consumer advocacy organization, it is refreshing to hear White's commitment to protecting our most vulnerable even as we chart a new energy future.
Mayor White's stated goals are to become more energy independent for basic security reasons and to be in control of our energy future. To do so, he maintains that we must reduce our pollution based on sound science, and do so in a way which does not burden low-income households. He proposes three main mechanisms to meet these goals:
Cut the amount of fuel we use in vehicle travel without impinging on people's ability to travel freely-- specifically by increasing our efficiency per mile traveled.
Cut the amount of energy consumed in buildings. Why drive up the cost of business by paying for electricity?
Decrease the amount of power we get from coal and substitute that power with cleaner sources
Despite some skepticism, Mayor White certainly showed that our energy future could have our cake and eat it too, namely through increased efficiency in building codes, fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and use of cost-effective renewables. See the edited video here:
Public Citizen does not and would never endorse candidates. Even if we could, it's hard to get an exact read on Mayor White and how he would act as the next Senator from Texas on the issue of federal climate policy -- so even so we could offer little endorsement other than a candid analysis of his words and his record.
When asked off-camera about how he would vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), the climate bill which passed in the House in June and due up for debate in the Senate over the next 2-3 months, he remained committed to energy efficiency but overall rather vague. White showed skepticism as to large long term goals rather than smaller but gradually increasing cuts in emissions. His version of the bill, he said, would have strong building code mandates, a renewable energy efficiency standard (which is it, Bill?) with a price cap on renewables to protect consumers, and change dispatch priorities to wean the nation off of coal fired power. He did not, however, indicate whether or not he would support implementing a federal cap on carbon dioxide emissions or the cap and trade mechanism.
This is a question likely to come up in the next few months when ACES comes to a Senate vote, and hopefully Mayor White will have a clearer answer prepared when that time comes. But if the final answer is no on ACES, would he have some specific policy solutions about how to improve the bill, or would he just cast the same "no way, never" vote that we'll likely get from John Cornyn or Kay Bailey Hutchison?
That being said, it is refreshing to hear a candidate speak so fluently about energy policy. Mayor White's record on energy as Deputy Secretary of Energy stands on its own, as does his impressive work on making Houston a national leader on energy efficiency. We may still be uncertain as to where he stands on ACES, but we certainly know his feelings on energy efficiency both in word and deed - which is nothing to sneeze at.
(An interesting take on Cap and Trade. - promoted by Matt Glazer)
The Cap and Trade Bill (HR 2454) is aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and create 'green' jobs, by putting a limit on the amount of pollution large industrial industries can output, and then if they go above that, they have to buy pollution permits. If some companies do not need all that they are allocated, they can sell their permits to companies that do.
Texas U.S. Representatives Joe Barton and Pete Sessions continue their lying campaign about the "Cap and Trade" legislation by claiming that President Obama's proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions would cost households as much as $3,100 per year. Their 'Party of No' says it is a "massive national energy tax." However Texans and Americans need to know the $3,100 figure they keep lying about is a complete misrepresentation of both President Obama's proposal and the studies from which the number is derived.
An EPA analysis (Environmental Protection Agency) of the draft version found that the 'cap & trade' policy has a relatively modest impact on U.S. consumers assuming the bulk of revenues from the plan are returned to American households. "The EPA estimates the average cost per household to only be between $98 and $140 per year.
NPR did a great story this morning on how this Climate Change bill has been watered down by the onslaught of lobbyists. Renewal energy targets have been reduced from 25% to 15%, and 85% of the pollution credits are actually given away upfront. For more information about Texas Climate Emergency Campaign, call them at 512/852-8776 or e-mail them at texasclimate@gmail.com. Their website is www.texasclimateemergency.org.
All Texas Congressional telephone numbers are at the end.
We are entering the final weeks of our campaign to provide security for future generations by avoiding the worst of coming climate chaos. House Speaker Pelosi has said that all the committees have to finish their work by Friday, June 19th, and on the week of June 22nd the Waxman-Markey (American Clean Energy and Security Act) (H.R. 2454) bill will go to the House for a vote.
However, the bill has been significantly weakened since it was first introduced in March. You can help make sure that the first climate bill to move through the House of Representatives actually takes meaningful steps to curb climate change. As written, the Waxman-Markey bill includes compromises that threaten to undermine the primary goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Waxman-Markey helps coal and oil industries instead of protecting consumers and the environment. Lawmakers have conducted closed-door negotiations with polluters, resulting in a bill that accommodates the financial interests of big energy corporations while squandering an opportunity to curb the coming climate chaos and doing little to help working families. Texas Climate Emergency Campaign is working with 1Sky, Friends of the Earth, Move On, Public Citizen, Greenpeace, and other groups in trying to strengthen this bill. Please ask your representative (numbers below) to work to improve the bill in three key ways:
1. Hold Polluters Accountable: By eliminating provisions that allow polluters to continue polluting at current levels for over a decade & by restoring authority to the EPA to mandate cleaner technology for power plants.
2. Ensure More Clean Energy for America: By increasing the renewable energy and energy efficiency standards. Require power companies to produce more clean energy than currently mandated. Wind and solar create more than twice as many jobs as coal and oil.
3. Create More Clean Energy Jobs for America: Limit giveaways to polluting industries, like Big Oil and Dirty Coal, and instead bolster green job development and protection of vulnerable communities.
LOCAL Washington D.C.
Henry Cuellar 956.725.0639 202.225.1640
Chet Edwards 254.752.9600 202.225.6105
Charlie Gonzalez 210.472.6195 202.225.3236
Al Green 713.383.9234 202.225.7508
Gene Green 281.999.5879 202.225.1688
Ruben Hinojosa 956.682.5545 202.225.2531
Eddie Bernice Johnson 214.922.8885 202.225.8885
Sheila Jackson Lee 713.655.0050 202.225.3816
Solomon Oritz 361.883.5868 202.225.7742
Silvestre Reyes 915.434.4400 202.225.4831
Ciro Rodriguez 210.922.1874 202.225.4511
(If anyone from Congresaman Gonzalez' office wants to respond to this, e-mail me at phillip@burntorangereport.com. We'll absolutely honor the "right to respond" policy here to learn more about why he has taken the stance he has on this measure. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
According to a Bloomberg article this morning, San Antonio Representative Charlie Gonzalez has joined
a group of Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee (who) want to give utilities free permits for all their existing carbon emissions, according to people familiar with a plan sent to the committee's chairman.
The article continues:
Representative Rick Boucher of Virginia sent the four-page list of recommendations to Henry Waxman, the committee's chairman and the author of draft climate-change legislation that some of his fellow Democrats are seeking to temper, said the people, who declined to be identified before the plan is made public. Courtney Lamie, Boucher's spokeswoman, didn't respond to e-mail and phone messages.
Waxman's measure would establish a cap-and-trade system of pollution credits designed to cut carbon dioxide 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. He needs to win the support of Boucher and the other Democrats pushing for changes in his plan because no Republicans are likely to vote for it, Representative Gene Green, a Texas Democrat, said yesterday.
"It's all about the consumer," said Representative Charles Gonzalez of Texas, whose San Antonio-area district has oil and gas operations. "It's also the economic interests of a member's district or region."
Charlie Gonzalez just doesn't have his facts straight on this one. If you're really concerned about consumers, giving away pollution credits for free is about the worst way you can write this bill. Giving away allowances would force customers to pay for industry and utilities' right to pollute without even cutting carbon emissions. There is a right and a very wrong way to write a good climate change bill, and Charlie is supporting the wrong way.
EPA's most recent analysis say that giving away pollution credits is "highly regressive", meaning it hurts low-income families the most. At best, this is a bailout and a free ride for the polluters. At worst it will create windfall profits for huge energy companies at the expense of every lower and middle income family in Texas. However, an auction fixes these problems. EPA continues:
"Assuming that the bulk of the revenues from the program are returned to households, the cap-and-trade policy has a relatively modest impact on U.S. consumers. . . . Returning the revenues in this fashion could make the median household, and those living at lower ends of the income distribution, better off than they would be without the program"
A good climate change bill will create billions of dollars of revenue by charging large polluters for the dangerous pollutants they've been emitting for decades. This money could then be returned to taxpayers, particularly low-income households, to protect them from any price increases that energy industries may try to pass through to consumers. Another portion of the money could also be used to pursue aggressive energy efficiency programs, so that citizens can save even more money by using less electricity. Every dollar spent on energy efficiency will then also help reinvigorate local economy by putting people back to work doing energy audits and retrofitting inefficient homes.
Congressman Charlie Gonzalez needs to hear that what consumers really need is energy efficiency, renewable energy, lower electric bills and less pollution - not more industry giveaways. So far, it looks like he's only heard from the lobbyists for the big polluters. We've heard that Congressman Gonzalez will cast a deciding vote on whether Texans will be given the tools to forge a new, green economy, or left unprotected from the worst effects of extreme weather and high energy prices.
Congressman Charlie Gonzalez is the swing vote on this issue. Please pick up the phone and call him. The phone number for his DC office is (202) 225-3236 and his office in San Antonio is (210) 472-6195. You can also email his office from his website.
***UPDATE*****
Looks like Charlie Gonzalez will actually be in San Antonio bright and early Saturday morning for the King William Parade. We'll be taking this opportunity to some pressure on the Congressman to support strong cap and trade legislation. If you'd like to participate, join us between 8 and 9 AM at the San Antonio Peace Center to pick up a sign, banner, or sign-on letter. For more information, visit Texas Vox.
