A Glorious Mess

Warts and All, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is Essential

SOURCE: AP/Ron Edmonds The Waxman-Markey bill's progress to a first historic vote hasn't been pretty—but it has been progress. Above: members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee after a meeting at the White House.

The full House of Representatives may vote tomorrow—or sometime quite soon—on the 1,201 page Waxman-Markey climate change bill, technically called the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. A group of 28 environmental organizations, including the Center for American Progress Action Fund, is calling this “one of the most important votes of our time.”

There’s no doubt that a historic decision is coming this year on climate change, and this is the biggest marker yet along the way. Either the United States will tackle global warming for the first time in 2009—or it may fail for the last time when it really mattered.

As is to be expected, then, the rhetoric is flying. Consider this unforgettable bit from the “junk science” denouncer Steven Milloy:

The House of Representatives will vote Friday on the so-called “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” — a.k.a the “Waxman-Markey” global warming bill. But whatever you want to call this legislative atrocity, if enacted into law, it will go down in history as the death knell of the American standard of living and way of life. If you hate America, this bill is for you.

As these lines suggest, the right wing line of attack on climate legislation has always been economic in nature. Yet just as with House Minority leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) egregious exaggerations of the bill’s likely cost, the most rigorous economic analyses don’t support anything Milloy says.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s study of Waxman-Markey, which would set a price on carbon dioxide emissions and ratchet acceptable levels down over time, found that costs per household would be on the order of $80 to $111 per year. The Congressional Budget Office comes up with a slightly higher estimate, $175 per year by 2020, but also notes that this number breaks in favor of the less wealthy: The lowest income households would actually see a benefit of $40 in reduced energy expenses while the wealthiest would see an increased cost of $245. Phrased differently, the CBO’s estimate is that the bill’s cost would be just 0.2 percent of after-tax income. The number is kept low by provisions that would return much of the revenue generated by the new law to consumers to help them offset energy price increases.

For the past month or more since it left Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) Energy and Commerce Committee, the battle over the bill wonks are calling the “ACES” has focused either on such economic issues, or on legislative horse-trading. For instance, the legislation saw some tangible weakening as a result of concessions made to Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), who had pledged to oppose the law and bring a number of rural lawmakers along unless it was made more favorable to agricultural interests. A deal with Peterson on the environmental consequences of biofuels triggered much denunciation from environmentalists, but also unleashed the bill for this first full House vote.

The Peterson-induced weakening—along with a sense that the bill wasn’t tough enough on coal to begin with—has led some green groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to take a critical stance on Waxman-Markey. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the bulk of the environmental community still supports the legislation’s passage. And for those who get sick to the stomach each time they see another compromise thrown into a bill that already isn’t absolutely ideal, here’s the thing: It could still get worse.

First there will be a flurry of attempted amendments in the House. And due to filibuster politics, the Senate will surely be far tougher place for this legislation. So if you don’t like what you see now, you’ll probably like it even less as time passes.

Yet there’s no question that all the most important pieces are in this bill: A price will, at long last, be set on carbon. Emissions will be ratcheted down over 80 percent by 2050. And the bill contains important requirements and incentives to promote a transition to renewable energy, including a national mandate that electricity suppliers obtain 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Anyone who has paid very close attention to the climate issue, and contemplated what it would really take to solve it, recognizes that we’re dealing with perhaps most tangled scientific and economic hairball imaginable. With the global scope of the problem, the uncertainty inherent in any prediction of the rate and intensity of future global warming, and the magnitude of the economic and energy changes required to bring about real change—well, it remains an open question whether governments of the world are even capable of dealing with something so vast and difficult. And of course any solutions will also have an aspect of the hairball about them.

But that doesn’t mean that if and when we get them, they won’t be stunning achievements.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: Climate Change

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