Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) said he believes a price on carbon pollution can provide a unique solution to both the country’s fiscal challenges and its looming climate crisis, uniting climate and deficit hawks. His presentation put the challenge to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Republican budget chief, who has claimed that Congress has a “moral obligation” to reduce the country’s debt. With former Republican congressman Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD), Waxman explained how tackling climate pollution can address fiscal, energy, environmental, and economic challenges simultaneously:

A price on carbon can give you a substantial amount of money to help deal with our fiscal problems. A price on carbon can move us away from our reliance on fossil fuels which add to the greenhouse gas emissions in our climate, and by doing that we can become less dependent on oil. We would be able to be a challenger in the economic future of clean energy.

Watch it:

“Do people want to cut Medicare and Medicaid?” Waxman asked. A rising price on carbon pollution, Waxman said, could raise over $1 trillion over several decades.

Gilchrest rebuked Ryan for ignoring the climate crisis in his depiction of the “defining moment“:

Paul Ryan said this is a defining moment for future generations as far as a fiscal sense for reducing the deficit. This is a defining moment on the planet of seven billion people extracting resources faster than they can be replaced, becoming a geologic force by pumping more carbon dioxide in decades than nature is able to store in the earth over millions of years. The defining moment is realizing that the market, capitalism, our civilization is actually a subset of the earth’s ecosystem. We’re not independent of the living machine that gives us life on earth. We’re dependent on it.

“The U.S. is facing a range of unprecedented fiscal and environmental challenges,” said Waxman. “We’ve got a confluence of events happening all at once.”

Waxman and Gilchrest recently co-authored a Washington Post op-ed with Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sherry Boehlert (R-MD) calling for climate-change policies to be considered for deficit reduction.

Mitt Romney’s top donor is Environmental Defense Fund board member Julian H. Robertson Jr., who has given $1.3 million to the Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future even though Romney has viciously attacked the climate cap-and-trade policies EDF supports. A spokesperson for the hedge-fund billionaire said that Robertson is confident Romney is lying to the public when he campaigns against climate action as the “Soros agenda,” and will “do the right thing” if elected:

In terms of the environment and climate-change controls, which [Julian Robertson] does believe is one of the most important issues the country and the world faces, he has confidence that Romney, once he’s in there, will do the right thing.

Robertson has been a long-time supporter of Romney, saying he’s “the smartest guy I’ve ever seen” in 2007. Robertson vigorously supported Obama’s cap-and-trade bill in 2009, because of the “danger of global warming.”

If Romney intends to support climate-change controls as president, he certainly hasn’t given any such indication on the campaign trail:

“Unlike Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney never sat next to Nancy Pelosi in an ad funded by George Soros on behalf of Al Gore’s global warming initiative. As recently as 2008, the Soros agenda had no better friend than Newt Gingrich.” [2/2/12]

“In my administration, coal will not be a four-letter word.” [3/5/12]

“I can tell you the right course for America with regard to energy policy is to focus on job creation and not global warming.” [11/2/11]

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In a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget, top House Republicans demanded the long-delayed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation for greenhouse gas pollution for very large emitters be killed. House energy committee chair Fred Upton (R-MI), former chair Joe Barton (R-TX), and energy and power subcommittee chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY) asked OMB acting director Jeffrey Zients to stay EPA’s regulation of new and modified power plants that produce more than 100,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide pollution:

We understand that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposal to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and modified power plants through the New Source Performance Standards program. We write to request that you withhold the regulation from issuance. We are concerned about the regulation’s impact on jobs and the economy, and that it will not comply with all applicable Executive Orders, including the President’s Executive Order 13563 and its predecessor, Executive Order 12866.

“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation,” begins Obama’s Executive Order 13563. “It must be based on the best available science.”

The EPA rule is the long-delayed result of a suit brought against the George W. Bush administration by several states in 2003, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Bush White House then blocked the efforts by the EPA to comply with the law, and the Obama administration has slowly rolled out a watered-down rule that won’t reach full implementation until 2016. Scientists have warned that the United States needs to rapidly reduce its carbon pollution no later than 2015 for human civilization to have a reasonable shot at maintaining a safe climate, based on the best available science.

However, in the fantasy world of Upton, Barton, and Whitfield, global warming doesn’t exist — so even the EPA’s soft limits on carbon pollution are a “back door cap-and-trade regime” that will “burden struggling businesses and families,” instead of one of the most important accomplishments of Obama administration to protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.

Electric utilities are the top contributors this cycle to Upton, Barton, and Whitfield. During this campaign cycle alone, the letter’s authors have received a combined $431,550 from electric power companies.

Download the anti-climate letter from Upton, Barton, and Whitfield to the OMB.

Report on a ten-state initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions shows the program is a success after three years.

By Maria Gallucci, excerpted from InsideClimate News

The state of Massachusetts is quietly reaping the benefits of cap and trade, the much-maligned process for curbing greenhouse gas emissions that federal lawmakers and many state governments resoundingly rejected in recent years. According to a recent study, cap and trade has created 3,800 jobs and nearly $500 million in economic activity for Massachusetts since 2008.

Massachusetts belongs to theRegional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first and only mandatory carbon emissions trading scheme in America. A report analyzing data from the first three years of the effort found that of the 10 participating Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, Massachusetts benefited most economically, because it used the bulk of its money to help fund its aggressive energy efficiency agenda.

“Energy efficiency investments have a much bigger multiplier effect than any other category of spending,” said Paul Hibbard, vice president of the Analysis Group, the Boston-based consulting firm that prepared the report. When homeowners and businesses used RGGI dollars to retrofit and weatherize buildings, they not only ended up saving on energy costs and spending money elsewhere in the economy—they also put contractors and installers to work.

RGGI “is a very successful program … and we look forward to continue achieving those results,” Mark Sylvia, commissioner of Massachusetts’ Department of Energy Resources, told InsideClimate News.

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The Washington Post gives former House speaker Newt Gingrich a rare upside down Pinocchio for this whopper on Saturday:

“I’ve said publicly, sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi is the dumbest single thing I’ve done in the last few years. But if you notice, I’ve never favored cap and trade, and in fact, I actively testified against it. I was at the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee the same day Al Gore was there to testify for it, I testified against it and through American Solutions we fought it in the Senate and played a major role in defeating it.”

In fact, as the WashPost points out, in a February 2007  Interview on PBS’s “Frontline” Gingrich said:

“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”

That is a pretty unequivocal endorsement of cap-and-trade.

Gingrich is a major-league flip-flopper, like Mitt Romney, but somehow he gets more of a pass by the GOP base since they know he is very conservative in his core.  The Post summed up Gingrich’s flip-flop this way:

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In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claimed that he “never favored cap and trade,” four years after he expressed “strong support” for a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon pollution. Gingrich told questioner Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia attorney general, that the climate action ad he did with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of Al Gore’s We Campaign was the “dumbest thing” he’d ever done:

I said publicly sitting on the couch with Pelosi is the dumbest thing I have done. But I never favored cap and trade and actively testified against it. I was in the U.S. House and Energy Committee the same day Al Gore was there to testify for it and I testified against it. Through American Solutions we fought it in the Senate and we played a major role in defeating it.

Watch it:

In 2007, Gingrich told Frontline he would “strongly support” a mandatory cap and trade program:

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.

Gingrich may never have “favored” cap-and-trade. Instead, he strongly supported it.

Gingrich’s positions on global warming and federal climate policy have twisted in the wind over more than two decades, with his positions mostly coinciding with whether the party holding the presidency is a Republican or a Democrat. Here’s ThinkProgress Green’s exclusive history of the epic series of reversals Gingrich has made since 1989, while carbon pollution and the earth’s temperature have skyrocketed:
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Other key stories below: Wind Power Record Set in Texas — 15.2% of Demand; EPA Plans to Regulate Water from Fracking

California Becomes First State to Adopt Cap-and-Trade Program

The California Air Resources Board on Thursday unanimously adopted the nation’s first state-administered cap-and-trade regulations, a landmark set of air pollution controls to address climate change and help the state achieve its ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The complex market system for the first time puts a price on heat-trapping pollution by allowing California’s dirtiest industries to trade carbon credits. The rules have been years in the making, overcoming legal challenges and an aggressive oil industry-sponsored ballot initiative.

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