Via Memeorandum, this WSJ piece:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scheduled a vote Friday on a sprawling climate-change bill, signaling the Democratic leadership’s confidence that it can overcome objections from Farm Belt Democrats.
Opponents and supporters of landmark climate legislation are ramping up their public-relations campaigns ahead of the planned vote. The Obama administration is pushing the measure as a job-creator, while critics, including many Republicans, are portraying the bill as an energy tax that could slow the economy.
The legislation, co-sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D., Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass.), had stalled last week because of opposition from Farm Belt Democrats concerned their states will face heavier costs under the proposed law to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
Discussions were still continuing Tuesday. Josh Syrjamaki, chief of staff for one of those Democrats, Minnesota Rep. Timothy Walz, said his boss hadn’t yet given his support for the bill because he hadn’t yet seen details of a deal.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said in an email late Monday evening: “There are some issues still under discussion, but we are confident we can resolve them by the time the bill goes to the floor on Friday.”
The bill aims to cap greenhouse-gas emissions at 17% of 2005 levels by 2020 and at roughly 80% by 2050, creating a market for companies to buy and sell the right to emit carbon dioxide and other gases. It also mandates a new renewable electricity standard and establishes new national building codes.
I’m sure Tim F. will have more to say about this, as this is one of his major issues, but reading this, I’m reminded of a quip made by Bill Maher that this really should be the Republican position- setting up a market for buying and trading emission rights.
Napoleon
Does this make sense to anyone else?
Brick Oven Bill
Carbon dioxide makes up 0.028% of the earth’s atmosphere, 95% of carbon dioxide is generated by sources other than man, and at most we might be able to decrease man’s generation of this gas by perhaps 5%. So all of this man-made ‘Global Climate Chaos’ is about 0.00007% of the earth’s atmosphere.
If you think a modification of 0.00007% of the earth’s atmosphere will lead to Global Climate Chaos, you are an idiot.
Nancy Pelosi either thinks that a modification of 0.00007% of the earth’s atmosphere will lead to Global Climate Chaos, or she is dishonest, or she is an investor in T. Boone Picken’s windmills (i.e. water line right-of-way easement eminent domain) project.
Or perhaps all of the above.
stacie
@Napoleon: I saw that too. An editor somewhere was napping.
Zifnab
It WAS a Republican position, back when Democrats were talking about a carbon tax. Such left-wing ideologues as Newt Gingrich and John McCain have championed it. The only problem is that Democrats picked up the idea as compromise legislation and the GOP was forced to abandon support or risk NOT pissing off the liberals.
Napoleon
@stacie:
The numbers must be flipped, 80% by 20 and 17% by 50.
Zifnab
@Brick Oven Bill:
Shorter BoB: NOAA is full of idiots. That, and I suck at basic math. (Psst, BoB, 5% < 17% < 80%)
chopper
if only BOB would use more than 0.00007% of his brain at any given time.
stacie
John, this was the Republican position. The idea of Cap and Trade came out of Nixon-era EPA computer modeling to determine the best way to achieve reductions of a given pollutant. According to Steve Benen, no less a GOP luminary than Newt Gingrich was pushing a Cap and Trade proposal a few years back.
This almost gets back to the Symbolism vs. Policy orientations of the two parties that (I think) DougJ noted in a post over the weekend. Republicans support the symbolism of Cap and Trade — a market-driven path to carbon reduction — but as a policy matter they don’t accept that there’s a problem, thus there’s no reason to try to solve it. Or they accept that there’s a problem but it isn’t linked to man’s activities, so only the baby Jesus can fix it. Or they accept that there’s a problem and it’s linked to man’s activities, but believe that government regulation is worse than widespread human suffering to include the eradication of some island nations and the wholesale relocation of their people and culture to new places. Or they suspect that the world is ending, but that’s certainly preferable than a minor tax hike.
Either way, Cap and Trade is something that the GOP can support as a symbol of the kinds of 21st century solutions to problems that they should be championing to return to the majority and their rightful place as America’s leading party, but if you intend to implement it… well, if we do that then it’s just another government program.
PeakVT
I realize BoB is just trolling here, but it does get annoying to have to rehash the basic science of climate change all the time.
Zifnab
@PeakVT: Don’t bother He’ll just misinterpret your words, accuse you of conspiring with Al Gore to horde all the big houses, and throw up some distantly debunked article linked off World Nut Daily about how we’re really going into a second ice age and only the massive burning of fossil fuels will save us.
Woody
I see a new bubble building in CO2.
“The Carbonated Economy”
SpotWeld
Bob.. by that logic you must think a layer of sunblock that is 0.00007% as thick as your skin is not enough to prevent you from getting burned right?
RememberNovember
If I could sell my emissions I’d be rich. Pass the pinto beans!
Brick Oven Bill
This troll writes presently from the former shore of an ancient lake. People find old shells and things at this elevation. The lake is gone and I now have to use a well to get drinking water. I do not know where the lake has gone to, but I will attribute its loss to Global Climate Chaos, which is, by observation, nothing new.
Chainsaw Nancy’s theory goes that increasing concentrations of CO2 will increasingly insulate the earth, retaining the sun’s heat, causing temperatures to rise. Under this assumption, temperatures would rise in accordance with a second-order differential equation, meaning it would accelerate upward. Thus the old ‘hockey stick’ thing.
This theory fit the data up to around the turn of the century, when Big Al was setting up his carbon credit business. Unfortunately for Big Al and Chainsaw Nancy, the data has not fit the theory for the past decade. Thus the new ‘Global Climate Chaos’ thing.
Personally, I believe that the most likely cause of Global Climate Chaos is the nature of the sun, which is a star that heats the earth. The sun is constantly changing.
someguy
Unfortunately, the Republican position on this and every other issue of note is sitting cross-legged in the corner with a hockey helmet on, hitting their heads on the wall and wailing about teh ghey marridge and birth certificates.
Er, I mean a football helmet. Republicans wouldn’t support those communist Canadian sports like hockey and curling.
JasonF
@someguy:
Hockey is now a good, American, Republican sport that our brave men and women in Iraq have put their lives on the line to defend, you betcha, don’t ya know. Also.
The Other Steve
I’ve come to the opinion that this bill should be defeated as it’s absolutely worthless.
The concept that we can effect global warming by treating CO2 as a pollutant is fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure. Furthermore this bill is so full of loopholes that it’s ineffective even as designed.
What we need is fundamental discussion on our Energy future which centers around government investment into alternatives, whether that be Wind, Solar, Nuclear or whatever. That investment and commitment to a new technology will help push the old technologies out the door much faster than trying to simply penalize old tech with nothing to replace it.
I understand the concept that the environmental lobby is trying to utilize the free market by penalizing what we don’t like in order to encourage development of something new. But I think history has shown that this does not work and instead generates great resentment from the population.
Steeplejack
@stacie:
Excellent post.
Evinfuilt
@Brick Oven Bill:
too bad us intelligent scientist people did tests on that theory in the early 90s, and continue… constantly showing the same results. this has nothing to do with the sun.
Plus the sun doesn’t have the ability to acidify the ocean, CO2 does, and that’s happening right now, destroying more life on this planet than you can wrap your mind around.
/Geophysics Nerd
chopper
@SpotWeld:
plus, i ate 0.00007% of my weight in botulinum toxin just an hour ago, and it obviously can’t hurt me because its
Zifnab
@The Other Steve:
If the cap and trade system was developed in a vacuum, without clean energy incentives or a retooling of the automotive industry, I might agree with you. However, the Obama Administration has kept Climate Change as a factor in nearly everything he’s touched.
The “symposium to decide what the hell to do” ship sailed a long long time ago. You can’t dictate how people generate energy. The best you can do is shift incentives. Part of that incentive shift has come in the form of grants and loans for clean energy plants. Part has come from increasing the penalties for lagging behind the curve – raising CAFE standards and imposing taxes on excessive emissions.
A stick with no carrots isn’t much of a plan, but neither is a carrot with no sticks. Obama is wielding both.
Brick Oven Bill
We’ve been through this before Evinfuilt;
Carbonic acid is highly unstable and, even if CO2 concentrations were rising significantly, would only affect the very surface of the ocean.
This is why the guys trying to alarm us with the ocean acidification theory take their pH readings in streams of bubbles.
stacie
@The Other Steve: There is a great deal of question about whether any of the proposals that congress is considering will work as advertised. The EU launched Cap and Trade in a multi-phased process, and when they wrapped up Phase I in January 2009, they found that the caps the individual countries put in place at best held the line with earlier emissions levels and at worse allowed companies to produce more carbon than before. The EU’s entire carbon output in Phase 1 (I think it lasted two years, 2007-2009) increased by something like 1.4% (I’m going from memory here…).
I’m a supporter of cap and trade for a number of reasons, and for full disclosure I do freelance writing for a renewable energy start up, but if we’re going to create a marketplace for emissions credits, it needs to have the right incentives and disincentives. As to your point about funding alternatives research, I agree wholeheartedly, and one simple way to do that would be to include renewable energy producers in the initial carbon credit giveaway. The devilish details include how we properly handle a large energy producer that has coal fired plants in one state and hydro plants in another. In theory, that company could simply offset its dirty power with the credits it receives for its clean power, resulting in no change. The last time I checked, it looked like carbon-neutral energy producers were not in line to receive this particular funding option, which would provide substantial support for getting new technologies commercialized.
gnomedad
@Brick Oven Bill:
Bullshit. You’re talking about CO2 that circulates. Humans are releasing carbon that has been isolated from the biosphere for hundreds of millions of years. Big difference.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“If you think a modification of 0.00007% of the earth’s atmosphere will lead to Global Climate Chaos, you are an idiot.”
Or 98% of publishing climatologists. [Source: survey of climatologists by the American Geophysical Union’s house journal, Eos).
“We’ve been through this before Evinfuilt;
“Carbonic acid is highly unstable”
Equilibrium chemical thermodynamics ain’t your strength, is it?
“and, even if CO2 concentrations were rising significantly, would only affect the very surface of the ocean.”
No, no and no. Alteration of the hydrogencarbonate/carbonate balance affects the ability of marine life to form carbonate skeletons. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere shifts the balance toward the more soluble HC03 as acidity increases. This stresses the marine life, reducing the sequestration of carbon as carbonate exoskeletons. This is a *big* frickin’ deal.
I’ll trust what actual friggin’ oceanographers have to say on the topic rather than an oil shale tech who doesn’t understand the limits of his understanding, and who is a rotten writer to boot.