EPA Authority, Beyond Green Jobs, and Military versus Climate Security
July 28th, 2009
Today on Earthbeat, host Daphne Wysham discusses the threat to EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the latest climate legislation passed in the House with the Sierra Club’s senior counsel for climate change – David Bookbinder, and Matt Pawa, the legal director of the Global Warming Legal Action Project which is run by the Civil Society Institute. Matt suggests The Clean for more information about the House version of the bill. An editorial on the EPA’s authority by Daphne Wysham can be found on Alternet.
We discuss the need to move beyond just ‘green jobs’ with Joe Uehlein, the founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability and the former AFL- CIO representative to the UN Commission on Global Warming and Sean Sweeney, the director of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.
Is President Obama is putting our taxpayer money where his mouth is when it comes to the country’s climate security? We speak to the author of the new report ‘Military versus Climate Security’ with its author Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Music for this edition of Earthbeat comes from The Devil Makes Three.
Our theme music is Baladi by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
Image used courtesy of J. Reed via Flickr, licensed by Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
July 31st, 2009 at 11:38 am
Geoffrey Heal is a visiting Professor at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, a.k.a. professor of finance and economics at Columbia.
During a lecture on climate and economics at the LSE May 6 2009, Dr. Heal described how he saw this issue of Congress removing EPA power to regulate the CO2 emissions of coal plants.
When the Supreme Court recognized that the EPA already had the power to regulate CO2, according to Heal, it:
“radically changed the whole Congressional dynamics, because the fossil fuel industry is much more frightened of the EPA than it is of Congress. The EPA is likely to come up with some very stringent measures. The EPA, Obama’s EPA, is run by a bunch of environmentalists, and people who are very worried about climate change. So if its left to them, the US is going to get a very very strong environmental policy on CO2. So at this point, the fossil fuel lobby is actually trying to promote action in Congress, of a type that would preempt action by the EPA. So what the fossil fuel lobby is working for, is a weak Waxman-Markey bill…. which would both set standards lower than what the EPA would do on its own, and which would preempt action by the EPA.”
Heal likes the idea of the US finally doing something about CO2. He observed that if EPA regulations rather than new Congressional action turn out to be the way it is done, “the one downside” is “the EPA doesn’t have the power to do something like introduce a cap and trade system, or something like a uniform carbon tax. So anything the EPA does is liable to be inefficient from an economic perspective”
Heal commented on why the US fossil fuel lobby has such fantastic power:
“But the US is actually a major Petro-state. The US is the third largest oil producer in the world. The biggest producer is Saudi Arabia which produces about nine million barrels a day, second and third are Russia and America, producing both about 7 million barrels a day, the fourth biggest producer is Kuwait, and its down there at about three and a half million barrels a day. So Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia dominate the world oil market. You don’t think about the US as a major producer but it is. The US is also the second largest producer of coal in the world, after China. It has the largest coal reserves in the world. It is also the second largest producer of natural gas in the world. So the US is really a major producer of fossil fuels. When you add together its positions in coal, oil, and gas, the US is actually the largest producer of fossil energy in the world, by quite a large margin. So that perhaps gives you some perspective, of one of the sources of opposition to the reality of climate change in the US context”
Hendrick Hertzberg is a senior editor at The New Yorker magazine. I found one of his recent columns threw some light on why climate legislation is languishing even though we have a President who campaigned saying the US should respond to the reality as science describes it. Hertzberg was commenting on health care legislation, but he could have said the same about climate:
“…In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.
The way we do it is, shall we say, more exciting. For us, an election is only the opening broadside in a series of protracted political battles of heavy artillery and hand-to-hand fighting. A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down….”
I recommend to anyone wondering what position they should take on Waxman-Markey, a.k.a. ACES, even if they agree with Heal and Hertzberg, that they read “The Waxman Report”, by Congressman Henry Waxman. If anyone can make a case that it is worth passing ACES as part of an ongoing climate war, it is Waxman.
Professor Heal’s lecture, in a podcast put out by the LSE: http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20090506_1830_controversiesInTheEconomicsOfClimateChange.mp3
Hendrick Hertzberg’s “Second Opinions” column, appearing in the August 3 2009 New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/08/03/090803taco_talk_hertzberg
July 31st, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Its time to have a more serious debate about carbon capture and storage.
Climate activists have, for years, pleaded with civilization to take what scientists are saying seriously, yet now that we see the US Congress finally considering what its first steps will be we have a lot of those same climate activists telling everyone to ignore what many of those same scientists are saying.
For instance, on your show today, Sean Sweeney made this comment:
“We need to have a much broader conversation about the energy future of the US. And unfortunately, the unions involved have put a lot of their time and effort into promoting the clean coal idea and carbon capture and sequestration. And because they’re committed to that policy, they cannot imagine the US embracing science based targets, which is why the AFL-CIO for one, is one of the only national federations on the planet which has not yet accepted science based targets.”
Sean has equated support for carbon capture and storage as a way of limiting coal fired power plant emissions with denial. In his mind, obviously, it is as if the two concepts, i.e. belief that carbon capture could prove to be a significant technology in civilization’s struggle to survive, and acceptance of what climate scientists are saying civilization has to do are completely contradictory. Hence, in Sean’s mind it seems, if you believe in carbon capture, you reject science based targets. If you accept science based targets, you do not believe carbon capture can make a significant contribution.
This is ludicrous. There is the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage. Look it up and read it. Are we going to say the IPCC don’t know what they are talking about? There is the MIT The Future of Coal study, the McKinsey CCS: Assessing the Economics. There is the Stern Review. Stephen Chu sees that it is necessary to rapidly develop CCS. even if the US turns away from coal altogether, as part of the international effort to control CO2. Look up the IAC “Lighting the Way” report. Chu chaired the panel that wrote it. It was put out by “all the world’s science academies”. All of these reports either state or assume that carbon capture will be a part of any serious response to climate change.
Why would Sean expect types like the AFL-CIO to take him seriously? Sean’s position is based on a fantasy, i.e. that the same scientists who are warning we must act on the scientific evidence that the climate is changing also claim that carbon capture is not possible, can’t be implemented, will not be implemented, or should not be implemented. Its just not the case.
Al Gore’s famous campaign that there is no such thing as “clean coal” was a reaction to the Big Coal all talk and no build campaign on CCS, but Al went too far. Consider his argument: he says because there is no full scale plant anywhere yet, he can say ‘clean coal” doesn’t exist.
What about solar thermal power? Why is that the last time I checked, last fall, the yearly output of the largest solar thermal plant yet announced (in Spain) was about the same as the yearly output of the largest coal fired plant that had carbon capture (Vattenfall’s Schwarz Pumpe in Germany), yet the Al Gore’s of this world can describe one technology as ready to go right now, calling it the way of the future, and describe the other as it does not exist?
Gore seems to be saying that if the US isn’t building, the technology can’t be real. Its ludicrous. Isn’t it the case that no pollution control technology was implemented by an industry until they were forced to by regulation or putting a price on the pollutant they are emitting? What did people expect the coal industry to do – spend billions implementing full scale CCS when emitting CO2 was unregulated, and they could do it for free?
No wonder the unions look at types like Sweeney and just see them talking gibberish. The change Sweeney, and many climate activists who think there is a need to bring the labour unions on side, need to make in their position is to acknowledge that calling for proving out at full scale this carbon capture technology as quickly as possible is a science based position,
Or are we going to argue about whether the IPCC, Lord Stern, MIT, McKinsey, Stephen Chu, and many many others don’t know what they are talking about?
July 31st, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Geoffrey Heal is a visiting Professor at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, a.k.a. professor of finance and economics at Columbia.
During a lecture on climate and economics at the LSE May 6 2009, Dr. Heal described how he saw this issue of Congress removing EPA power to regulate the CO2 emissions of coal plants.
When the Supreme Court recognized that the EPA already had the power to regulate CO2, according to Heal, it:
“radically changed the whole Congressional dynamics, because the fossil fuel industry is much more frightened of the EPA than it is of Congress. The EPA is likely to come up with some very stringent measures. The EPA, Obama’s EPA, is run by a bunch of environmentalists, and people who are very worried about climate change. So if its left to them, the US is going to get a very very strong environmental policy on CO2. So at this point, the fossil fuel lobby is actually trying to promote action in Congress, of a type that would preempt action by the EPA. So what the fossil fuel lobby is working for, is a weak Waxman-Markey bill…. which would both set standards lower than what the EPA would do on its own, and which would preempt action by the EPA.”
Heal likes the idea of the US finally doing something about CO2. He observed that if EPA regulations rather than new Congressional action turn out to be the way it is done, “the one downside” is “the EPA doesn’t have the power to do something like introduce a cap and trade system, or something like a uniform carbon tax. So anything the EPA does is liable to be inefficient from an economic perspective”
Heal commented on why the US fossil fuel lobby has such fantastic power:
“But the US is actually a major Petro-state. The US is the third largest oil producer in the world. The biggest producer is Saudi Arabia which produces about nine million barrels a day, second and third are Russia and America, producing both about 7 million barrels a day, the fourth biggest producer is Kuwait, and its down there at about three and a half million barrels a day. So Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia dominate the world oil market. You don’t think about the US as a major producer but it is. The US is also the second largest producer of coal in the world, after China. It has the largest coal reserves in the world. It is also the second largest producer of natural gas in the world. So the US is really a major producer of fossil fuels. When you add together its positions in coal, oil, and gas, the US is actually the largest producer of fossil energy in the world, by quite a large margin. So that perhaps gives you some perspective, of one of the sources of opposition to the reality of climate change in the US context”
Hendrick Hertzberg is a senior editor at The New Yorker magazine. I found one of his recent columns threw some light on why climate legislation is languishing even though we have a President who campaigned saying the US should respond to the reality as science describes it. Hertzberg was commenting on health care legislation, but he could have said the same about climate:
“…In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.
The way we do it is, shall we say, more exciting. For us, an election is only the opening broadside in a series of protracted political battles of heavy artillery and hand-to-hand fighting. A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down….”
I recommend to anyone wondering what position they should take on Waxman-Markey, a.k.a. ACES, even if they agree with Heal and Hertzberg, that they read “The Waxman Report”, by Congressman Henry Waxman. If anyone can make a case that it is worth passing ACES as part of an ongoing climate war, it is Waxman.