Here’s a followup story on the eventually successful negotiations among members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the cap-and-trade bill.
Climate change legislation moving through Congress would give refiners free permits to emit greenhouse gases under a compromise engineered by a Texas Democrat whose Houston district includes many petrochemical plants.
Rep. Gene Green led the push for refiners along with Democratic Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, who represents San Antonio — home to the corporate headquarters of refiners Valero Energy and Tesoro Corp.
The two lawmakers got the deal added to a climate change bill agreed to by most Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and backed by the measure’s two sponsors, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Ed Markey, D-Mass.
Green and Gonzalez also scored a major concession sought by oil companies when committee leaders scrapped a proposal that would impose steadily stiffer limits on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions — and make the industry pay for allowances to cover the excess pollutants released when their fuel is burned.
Half a loaf is better than none. Half a loaf is better than none. Half a loaf…you get the idea. I think if I say it a few dozen more times, I’ll be able to say it with conviction.
The Waxman-Markey bill, which the Energy and Commerce Committee is slated to consider next week, would cap carbon dioxide emissions at 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.
Power plants, refiners, manufacturers and other operations could exceed the limits by buying and exchanging emissions allowances on a new carbon-trading market.
To defray costs for some polluting industries, Waxman and Markey agreed to give away more than half of those allowances in the early years of the so-called “cap-and-trade” plan, with the bulk of them — 35 percent — going to local electricity distributors.
An additional 15 percent would be donated to trade-sensitive industries, and 3 percent would be given to automakers.
Eventually, companies would be weaned off the free allowances and would then have to buy the permits from the federal government at auction.
Under the deal with Green and Gonzalez, refiners would get 2 percent of the free allowances starting in 2014 and ending in 2026.
On Friday, that agreement was being attacked by both oil industry leaders, who said it wouldn’t offer enough economic protection, and environmentalists, who complained it was an unnecessary giveaway.
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said the 2 percent free allowances is “inequitable” because it falls short of the roughly 4.3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions estimated to come from refiners.
The result, he said, will be “greater costs on consumers and producers of oil and gas.”
Yeah, dire warnings by a to-be-regulated industry about passing the cost along to the consumer is pretty much the last refuge of the scoundrel. The consumer is already bearing the costs of the pollution, in the form of adverse health effects and the eventual catastrophe that global warming will bring if it’s not checked now. It’s just that those costs are indirect, and they provide no incentive to ameliorate the underlying causes of those costs, which if dealt with would serve to lower them. So with all due respect to Mr. Gerard, I consider his words on this to have as much credibility as a Wall Street financier’s words arguing against tighter regulation of that industry on the grounds that it could damage the economy. A statement from the organizers of Friday’s rally about that event is beneath the fold.
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