House Passes Cap-and-Trade Bill June 29th, 2009
Last Friday, June 26th, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the “American Clean Energy and Security Act” (H.R. 2998). Though far from becoming law, the 219-212 vote in favor is the first step toward placing a cap on the amount of green house gases industry and businesses can emit. It also sets up a market allowing entities that pollute less to sell their carbon credits to businesses that pollute more. It is a major, if imperfect, first step towards moving America in the direction of a clean energy future. The bill now moves to the Senate, where it faces an even tougher path to becoming law and may not even come up for vote before the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Without at least 60 votes in favor of the legislation, the bill will surely face a filibuster and may never come to vote.
The bill will go through more changes and compromises before becoming law, thus probably becoming even more “watered down” in the process and prompting some to question the merit of passing such a complex patchwork of legislation. As it is now, there are so many compromises that people on all sides of the debate can probably find something to both praise and criticize. President Obama, for his part, has already objected to the fact that the bill has a clause that would impose tariffs and other trade penalties on countries that do not enact their own caps on greenhouse gasses. “At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade,” he said, “I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.”
The Senate version of the bill will differ from the House version but for sake of simplicity and summary, the following are the main provisions in the current House version, as seen in the Washington Post.
– Emissions from a large sector of the U.S. economy, including power plants, factories and auto tailpipes, would be required to be cut 17 percent below their 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent below those levels by 2050.
– These reductions would be managed by requiring emitters to amass buyable/sellable “credits” equal to their pollution.
– About 85 percent of these credits would be given away, many with the mandate that electricity distributors sell them and use the proceeds to soften the blow of rising energy prices. Environmentalists had wanted the government to auction all of them.
– Electricity producers would be required to get at least 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, with as much as 5 percent more energy saved from new efficiency measures. The two figures must add up to 20 percent.
– Polluters could also balance out some of their emissions by purchasing carbon “offsets,” which are official certificates that greenhouse gas emissions have been avoided or taken out of the air. In a last-minute amendment, oversight over offsets generated on farms was taken from the Environmental Protection Agency and given to the Department of Agriculture.
– A new Clean Energy Deployment Administration funded with $7.5 billion in “green bonds” would provide government money to private companies investing in environmentally friendly technologies.
[Image from The Washington Post]
This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Business, Clean Technology, Efficiency, Green Economy, Justin Manger, Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
