Did Copenhagen die yesterday? David Steven
January 20, 2010 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, North America | One comment
Yesterday, I speculated about prospects for the Copenhagen Accord if Democrats lost their super-majority in the Senate. Well, voters in Massachusetts handed them a thumping – so what next?
In Politico, Martin Kady II looks on the bright side. Yes, healthcare may now be dead (many Democrats seem to be abandoning it without a fight – though I suppose that could change over the next 24 hours) – but Obama can still get other key parts of his agenda through Congress, Kady believes.
Unfortunately, on climate, what looks bright to Kady is likely to look exceptionally gloomy to those outside America’s borders.
A cap-and-trade bill has a shot in the Senate – as long as the cap-and- trade part is removed. If Democrats dump that toxic measure and pursue a more modest climate and energy bill, they’ve actually got a shot at getting something done – and getting a few Republican votes to push them past 60.
Voinovich and Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) are working on a smaller-scale proposal that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. And moderate Democrats are pushing Senate leadership to drop the cap-and- trade provision in favor of an energy-only bill, which could include renewable fuels standard tax incentives for alternative energy…
“It is my assessment that we likely will not do a climate change bill this year, but we will do energy,” Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said Tuesday. “I think it is more likely for us to turn to something that is bipartisan and will address the country’s energy interest and begin to address specific policies on climate change.”
The Voinovich-Lugar bill will do little to cap, let alone reduce, emissions. Voinovich is certainly no fan of action on climate change. He has been holding out for a new analysis of cap and trade from EPA – believing the agency is holding back information on the true costs.
His main priority is reduce America’s dependency on the Middle East, wanting the US to become the least dependent on imported oil of any country in the world. He’s thinks the US should go after “every drop” of its oil shale and should also invest heavily in using coal as a substitute for oil.
On climate itself, he thinks the 17% emissions reduction by 2020 on 2005 levels, which President Obama promised at Copenhagen, is much too ambitious. He sees little point in the US reducing its emissions if China and India don’t do the same.
If Voinovich is now the best hope for getting bipartisan support for US domestic legislation, then I think Copenhagen’s prospects are grim indeed. Expect it be starring in its own Monty Python sketch sometime around the time of the US mid-terms.
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With health care legislation, Senators voted along party lines, which means that loss of the supermajority is very serious. But if I understand things correctly, the House could pass the Senate bill and the Senate wouldn’t need to vote again.
With cap-and-trade, there would most probably be some Republicans who would vote for a bill (likely to include Snowe, Collins, Graham), and it might even be possible to get Murkowski’s support if the bill stops the EPA from being able to regulate emissions. Unfortunately, there are a similar amount of Democrats who are unlikely to support a bill. Some sort of political pressure (maybe an advertising campaign similar to the posters at Copenhagen airport) could be required to get these Senators to vote for a bill.
The difficulty with any legislation that puts a price on carbon is that it is easy for firms to pretend that a carbon price will cripple them, and they have an incentive to do this so that they get free permits. This continues to be a problem until the carbon price is introduced, and people realise that the adverse economic impact is negligible. This means that to get a good carbon pricing policy is an iterative process.
Maybe a way to get out of the mess that we are in is to get the Senate to pass a bill that places a low fixed price on carbon relatively soon (e.g. similar to the Kerry-Boxer floor price), with the intention being to pass some sort of cap-and-trade scheme later.