Big Picture on Climate Change
One thing that’s daunting about working on Climate Change is the multitude of factors which you need to consider. Crafting and sustaining legislation to address Climate Change will take place of most if this century and actually stabilizing the world’s carbon trajectory involves coordinating the entire global economy. So when you talk about the big picture for Climate Change, it’s a really big picture.
Which explains why you’ve got several major groups like Greenpeace withholding their support for the current Climate Change legislation. Looking at the bill from different perspectives or time frames really changes your view of the bill. Here are three viewpoints that are dominating the debate:
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We Can Do Better.
I think this view is largely focused on short term domestic change. It’s undeniable that Waxman-Markey has some warts, but to take it further it’s even true that many of those warts could be avoided using alternative legislative strategies. The primary method would be dropping the weak Cap and Trade elements and focusing on green energy and green jobs. Sustainable energy has more friends and less enemies then Cap and Trade. You design a policy that alters our energy trajectory substantially while reducing the agitation of coal, oil, and agriculture interests. Further because there would be no offset program to abuse you could likely craft legislation that reduced carbons emissions more and cost consumers less in the next 5 years.
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This is Bill is Revolutionary.
This position, which has been expressed President Obama, Al Gore, John Podesta, is much more focused on the long term. The Waxman-Markey bill sets a path towards dramatic long term carbon emissions reductions. Reducing carbon emission will become a formal national goal for the next 40 years. That’s a game changer, that only a Cap and Trade system like Waxman-Markey can deliver.
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The World Needs Us To Pass This Bill
A complementary argument to the above would be to focus on international change. It’s essential for us to commit to formal carbon reduction targets to facilitate action by Europe, China, India, and other big emitters. A bad bill that helps facilitate international action in China and India is worth more then a great bill that doesn’t set demonstrate we’re committed making tough change and thus undermines international action.
And it only gets more complicated when you start to critique each of these viewpoints. How much better could this bill really be and still get passed? Wouldn’t we make similar long term commitments sooner or later? Who says this bill will spur international action?
Each of the above perspectives contains a lot of truth, but ultimately the international and long term aspects of this debate need to carry the day. We need Waxman-Markey to become law and worry about fixing it through future legislation and impacting the rule making process, and monitoring the implementation of the bill. Particularly for income protection I think there are genuine opportunities to revisit and fix the policy.
There’s a lot of danger in passing Waxman-Markey, it could be too little too late, it could be politically harmful, and it could damage the integrity of the environmental movement, but those dangers are present in all the alternative courses of action. If we can make carbon reduction a national priority even if the related policy is imperfect we need to support that effort.
Crossposted at Carrots and Sticks
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Tags: Global Warming, Waxman-Markey
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I think it may be a bit excessive to claim that the world needs the US to pass the bill. Yes, the US needs to pass the bill for its own sake. If it does not it will very rapidly find itself in the energy and economic backwaters, being surpassed by countries like Germany, Spain and China that are gearing up for green energy production on a massive scale.
If the US fails to keep pace with the world, it will cease to be a super power and someone else will take up the challenge. My money’s on China. Imagine a world where China is the dominant economic and military power. If the US doesn’t get its act together that will soon be the reality.
America certainly could and should make clean energy a national security objective. We’ve got the technology base to lead the world on this, but we’ve misdirected our efforts for decades.
That said I don’t American relative power is at stake. For one thing if we continue to increase our greenhouse gases, so will everybody else until a major energy breakthrough. If such a breakthrough isn’t made by America it would likely come from Europe or Japan, not China. I think it’s easy to mistake the search for a revolutionary power source and clean energy. Revolutionary power is probably still far away, while clean energy exists already and can be scaled up more quickly. To give an example advances in cellulosic ethanol would be more likely to lead a cleaner energy future, as opposed to just making gasoline an obsolete fuel.
A lot of bad things would happen if we follow the let world burn path, but America is as well positioned as any country to deal the impacts. America would better off in absolute terms pursuing clean energy, but the idea of falling behind is more of public relations tactic then a real threat.