Memo to House GOP: We get it. You don’t believe in clean, safe sources of energy that never run out or in protecting our children and grandchildren from catastrophic global warming or in competing with China, Japan, and Europe for the jobs and industries of the future or in making polluters pay (see House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate).
But your list of 450 planned amendments to Waxman-Markey during the markup next week — [insomniacs can download the list here] — goes beyond principled opposition to petty politics.
Two dozens amendments removing the tax benefits for each and every corporate member of the US Climate Action Partnership (which served as the basis of Waxman-Markey)? How proud the founding fathers would be to see you try to use the tools of governance for meaningless attempts at retribution.
And 50 separate amendments to let each individual state opt out? [Plus a DC-opt-out amendment! It's nice to know you thought of us, too, even though you won't let us have any representation in our government, but, thank you, no, we want clean energy jobs and a livable climate.]
I am interested to see details of the “American Hero Exemption and Credit,” but since it follows the “Defense Department Exemption,” I’m guessing it would be an amendment to exempt veterans from the bill. Of course, if America keeps following your all of the above more-of-the-same energy policy, then we’ll end up with lots more veterans as it would mean our dependence on oil from unstable regions would keep rising and rising.
And what is the point of more than 100 amendments of the form:
- Suspends the Act should more than 1,000 jobs in Wyoming be lost due to implementation of this Act
- Suspends the Act should 2,000 jobs in Texas be lost due to implementation of this Act
- Suspends the Act should more than 5,000 jobs in Utah be lost due to implementation of this Act?
What can one say but, Joe ‘get shade’ Barton and House GOP plan to fiddle furiously while planet burns.
And speaking of letting the planet burn, the House GOP has introduced its alternative bill (summary here). You can’t really call it an alternative climate bill, since it doesn’t stop US greenhouse gas emissions from rising and the words “climate change” and “global warming” hardly appear in it at all — except to strip any authority from the EPA to address the problem. The bill doesn’t define the GOP position so much as redefine it or rather undefine it — the bill would undefine the word “pollutant” so that it doesn’t include greenhouse gases, and undefine renewable energy so that it does include nuclear power.
Indeed, the plan is almost indistinguishable from the infamous Cheney energy plan. You’ll remember that at the beginning of the Bush administration Cheney developed a “comprehensive” energy plan after consulting with a vast array of stakeholders — from “Exxon to “Mobil” as one pundit quipped. Well, the House GOP remove the staples and replaced the cover.
Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, has an excellent critique first published by Wonk Room, which I reprint below:
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, today unveiled a cynical Republican alternative to the clean energy jobs legislation being developed by committee Democrats. Barton is arguing that his legislation is a “viable alternative to a mandatory cap and trade plan” that sets economy-wide standards for global warming pollution.
In reality, it’s hardly a viable alternative “” only something that can be presented as one. This is basically a PR stunt aimed at conning the public to stay stuck in the same dirty energy rut that is destroying our economy and environment.
The Barton plan summary I’ve reviewed includes such choice items as:
- Repealing the Supreme Court decision which said the US EPA could limit greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
- Preempting state authority to reduce climate-related emissions. This is a direct attack on California and other states that have sought to avert the threat of catastrophic global warming and create green jobs.
- Providing regulatory and financial rewards to coal-burning power plants that use “currently available technology.” In other words, more dirty coal-fired plants that kill and sicken our children and grandparents.
- Providing new subsidies for hazardous nuclear power plants.
- Defines nuclear power and advanced coal technology as “renewable.”
- Repealing “decoupling” mandates that reward utilities for reducing wasted energy.
- Promoting more oil drilling off the coasts and Luntzian “environmentally sensitive American energy exploration” in the Arctic wildlife refuge.
- Subsidizing climate-killer fuels produced from coal, oil shale, methane hydrates, and tar sands.
While not quite ignoring the threat of climate change, Barton’s bill does spit in the face of science. The bill includes a provision that establishes emissions performance standards for new coal plants “” but “all existing generating facilities are grandfathered.” Unsurprisingly, Barton’s proposed standards are laughably weak, onlying require coal plants to be as efficient as less-polluting natural gas plants by 2030. This proposal, combined with the incentives for new drilling, the reversal of fuel economy standards, and promotion of highly polluting alternative fuels, would guarantee that U.S. emissions would continue to increase without bound for the foreseeable future.
Barton is just blowing smoke: new subsidies for oil, coal, and nuclear, rollbacks of environmental standards, Orwellian language, and denial of the science of climate change. Wasn’t eight years of planetary and economic destruction enough?
Wasn’t 8 years of Cheney-Bush enough?
Related head-in-the-sand conservatives:
- House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”
- Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’ “” invites ‘expert’ TVMOB (!) to testify
- House GOP pledge to fight all action on climate.
- Virtually every conservative in the Senate voted against the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner climate bill even though that bill was inadequate to stopping catastrophic warming.
- James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) believes a cap & trade bill will return GOP to power “in 2010″³
- Grover Norquist asserts that calls to take global warming more seriously will be “cheerfully ignored“
- 64% of GOP voters say global warming denier Palin is their top choice for 2012,
- “Several prominent party officials said they believe the GOP’s message is fundamentally sound when it comes to energy policy, pointing to that issue as one of the few political bright spots in recent years.“
- The Heritage Foundation even opposes energy efficiency
- The American Enterprise Institute is still crazy with denial and delay after all these years
- The Cato Institute believes adaptation is cheaper than mitigation.
- Columns by Charles Krauthammer and George Will and John Tierney have become science-free zones that demand more climate research while inveighing against all serious climate action and against all non-nuclear clean tech.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Republicans have become the Shoot Your Friend in the Face Party and the Tell Your Enemies to Go F Themselves standard bearers.
The only issue the GOP wants to take personal responsibility for today is other people’s pregnancies.
But we are rapidly reaching the time when the most effective way to stop emissions from rising in the atmosphere may be to stop Republicans from rising in the morning.
I see no difference between these amendments the Republicans are offering and a bad neighbor running a hose from his car’s exhaust into my home.
Calling these carbon collaborators “head in the sand conservatives” minimizes their danger and the threat to our future they are leading. I believe the dire terrorist threat facing our nation and our world comes not from Al-Qaeda or IslamoFascism, but from Republican IgnoramuFascists who are passionately willing to sacrifice the lives of their own families, friends and neighbors along with yours and mine in their blind and eternal alliance to the carbon-based economy.
There is nothing these people will not say or do to achieve their goals of pro-carbon agenda. The sooner we recognize the real risk they represent for all of us, the sooner we’ll take the urgent action their threat calls for.
Or we can just be clueless and caught with our pants down around our ankles like the entire George Bush administration was on Sept. 11, 2001.
Maybe we need a color-coded warning system and daily press briefings from the Department of Homeland Security to wake people up. Maybe we need a deck of playing cards featuring the 52 most dangerous Greenhouse Gassers – Cheney, Rove, Will, Rush, Krauthammer Newt, Congressman Boner, Eric Cantor, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, Exxon/Mobil’s CEO… Or perhaps we should just subcontract the necessary clean up operations to Halliburton and whatever letters Blackwater is calling themselves these days.
This is classic obstructionism and Rep. Waxman, as chairman of the committee, needs to get tough, stop trying to compromise and put an end to this nonsense. As I’ve maintained all along… as was obvious when not one single Republican in the House would vote for Obama’s stimulus package… there is NO POINT in trying to work with the GOP. It is a waste of time and you only end up watering down your legislation and then you STILL DON’T GET THEIR VOTES for it. They win both ways: They get you to delay and weaken your bill with the bogs idea of compromising “for the sake of the nation” and the health of the so-called “bi-partisan political process” and then they vote against it anyway and get obstructionist street credit with their radical base back home.
The Democrats *control* the House. What are they mucking about for? Tell the Blue Dog Dems to stop playing into the hands fo the GOP and get on board or face party abandonment in the 2010 election. The Democrats should just push their legislation through the committees, ignore the disloyal opposition, and pass the stuff on to the Senate as quickly as possible. This is what the GOP did for the six years they controlled the House from 2000 to 2006 and it worked for them. What are the Democrats waiting for, the Republicans to finally see the light? Ain’t gonna happen.
The Upside: A refusal to acknowledge and act on the climate/energy crisis is a rot that will eat away at the modern day conservative movement (I stress modern day because I’m not advocating for the death of conservatism. The principles of accountability and rationality, which have nearly evaporated in the current conservative movement, are essential to preserving a healthy tension in our democracy.) But when the Waxman-Markey bill reaches the House floor, and not a single Republican casts a vote in favor, it will be both the zenith and the nadir of a movement in politics that just needs to go away.
The Downside: Strong legislative action needs to be taken in the short-term. A bitterly divided house can’t reach the level of consensus necessary to accomplish a massive overhaul of energy policy (imagine trying to enact legislation that would generate 10-12 stabilization wedges in today’s political climate). The GOP is not in any hurry to adopt rationale, scientifically based policy. And rust-belt Dems believe a vote for comprehensive energy reform has the potential to cost them significant voter support.
The Solution: Enormous citizen engagement. The massive street level protests of the 1960′s and 1970′s forced a reluctant Congress to pass the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts as well as establish the EPA. A similar outpouring today would have equally immediate results. But I don’t see such a groundswell occurring for at least the next 10-15 years.
Gotta love what the Republicans are portraying as an alternative, so shortsighted.
Regarding who Cheney consulted for the previous Administrations energy plan, don’t forget to throw in that bastion of energy policy corruption and duplicity – Enron, Cheney talked with them extensively as the heads of Enron (Skilling and Lay) knew and were friends with Bush personally.
Written from Illinois which consulted with Enron extensively on how to “deregulate” our power generation industry/market – while I’m sure its set for Enron to “play” if they were still around, nobody knows what to do with it now. ;-)
Surely you jest and this is from the Onion. (Sadly I guess not. What is left for them and Andy Borowitz to do with this?)
Amendment 183 appears to possibly allowing logging as a carbon offset owing to wording “improved forest management”
And buried in the others is God knows what. But stunning reading.
This strikes me as way worse than the Cheney energy plan. (The bogus alternative bill or the amendments or both.) However, this also strikes me as a form of filibuster to prevent the bill from ever getting voted on. Is there a record for the number of amendments filed for a single bill? It strikes me that most of them could be combined into a handful of amendments.
There’s also the issue of: did the GOP’s industry pals (their lawyers/lobbyists) come up with the idea of creating as many amendments as possible to ridiculous extremes, to also bury some good amendments out there, or which they feared would come? From either party.
The image that came to mind was of all those little Lilliputians throwing a net over Gulliver.
I dare say the GOP would be happy to have Dem votes on the record as being against a “job protection” or some other amendment (see list) which they will call a bill rather than an amendment, but I doubt that’s the primary strategy because I’m not sure that it will work, but I guess it’s not to be counted out. (Given that the GOP is banking either figuratively or literally on the economy and everything else continuing to tank up to the next election cycle.)
By any objective standard nuclear power is not dangerous. In the last 20 years 2 people have died worldwide in nuclear accidents & about 50 falling off windmills. Equally, since we have enough uranium to keep going till the sun goes nova by any objective standard nuclear is renewable. Anybody who genuinely believes in catastrophic global warming must automatically support a massive increase in nuclear – the fact that almost all “environmental” organisation don’t merely proves they are Luddites flying a false flag.
Republicans are so hard to take seriously that they will take care of themselves. Personally, I’m much more worried about Greenpeace.
Sorry Neil Craig, but we don’t practice “automatic support” here, nor do we accept your Scottish definition of “Luddites” especially when we’re reading your diatribe sent from that tiny part of the British Empire you occupy on the world wide web, wirelessly over our network which is powered by the fiber optic line that brings us our broadband Internet, VOIP phone service and HD TV.
Your absurdly subjective personal opinion becomes no more credible by your overuse of the term “objective standard” than George Bush & Dick Cheney’s record on cutting Greenhouse gas emissions has been through their use of “clean coal.”
JR: “But your list of 450 planned amendments to Waxman-Markey during the markup next week — [insomniacs can download the list here]…”
It’s got a fair amount of duplicate entries in it. I was able to get it down to 16 pages by weeding those out (but mostly by reducing the text size to 10 points.)
” — goes beyond principled opposition to petty politics.”
You’ve got that right. The bit about requiring CCS storage at San Francisco’s Presidio is one example. (I could almost bet I know whose idea that is.)
But the main thing is the dozens of interlocking provisions to protect jobs and businesses — like the “offramps” that would put the whole Act up on blocks if it causes x number of jobs to be lost in any of 20 states (where, depending on the amendment, x varies from 1,000 to 1 million.) In addition to that, every state in the Union would get an “opt out” provision. On top of that are separate measures to protect coal jobs in West Virginia and Indiana.
And there are several amendments that seek to roll back the emissions standards in one way or another. Then there are the “safety valves” to protect various things (like tourism in the Virgin Islands.)
All in all it’s an outrageous collection. But there’s not much point in getting all wound up over individual items, since I guess very few of those amendments have a chance — they’re just delaying tactics.