Sixty percent of our annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are emitted by transportation petroleum-based fuels and coal-based electric power plants. Nowhere in the 1,200-page Waxman-Markey Clean Energy and Security Act (W-M) can you find an effective substitute for those fuels.
Coal plants can be replaced by nonpolluting nuclear reactors as in France, but nuclear is not mentioned in W-M. Most developed countries levy taxes on transport fuels, especially on gasoline. That leads to fuel-efficient cars, and the tax revenue funds and encourages the use of energy-efficient public transport. No mention of this approach in W-M.
Instead, we have an array of legislative mandates for renewable energy and efficiency without any explanation of how those mandates are to be achieved. W-M’s elaborate cap-and-trade system includes allowances which can be traded in financial markets. Wall Street eagerly waits. Polluters can earn up to 2 billion tons of tradable offsets by supporting renewable projects of uncertain merit in the US and abroad, but their pollution continues.
A complex rebate system is to protect manufacturers whose costs for allowances affect their international competitive position. Importers can also be required to purchase international reserve allowances to raise import costs, also to preserve the US competitive position. How all that will be administered is anyone’s guess.
Electric utilities must meet 20% of demand with renewable energy and improved efficiency by 2020. Carbon emissions are to be steadily reduced, with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) the prime enabling technology. There are no large-scale working CCS installations in the world. A study from scientists at the Universities of Wyoming and Houston estimates a need for 300,000 new injection wells for sequestration to meet W-M targets. Along with ancillary systems and pipelines, plus CO2 separation costs, CCS costs could exceed $1 trillion/year.
There is $4 billion to support a cash-for-clunkers program which will lead to the sale of imported cars, as few American cars meet the mileage standards in the program.
W-M supports increased mileage standards for cars and trucks while promoting E85 ethanol fuel, which reduces mileage performance by about 30%.
The efforts of Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) have added a 49-page amendment which excludes agriculture and forestry from the capped sector. It also excludes indirect land use from the evaluation of the environmental impact of biofuel production. Ethanol and biodiesel are exempted for 5 years from the limits placed on other fuels, although there is little scientific evidence of an environmental benefit from those fuels.
The responsibility for determining which practices are eligible for offsets is transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Secretary of Agriculture. This should result in more emphasis being placed on organic type farming practices as these are eligible for offsets.
The bill creates a program of worker training, education, and transition for jobs in renewable energy, building upgrades, and climate change mitigation. This could be administered under the new federal agency created by W-M, the Clean Energy Deployment Administration. There will also be a National Climate Service set up within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to support efforts by states to respond to changes brought about by global warming.
The bill encourages developing countries to take emission-reducing actions. Some funds from allowance sales are set aside to reward less developed countries (China?) which have taken verifiable and measurable emission reduction programs. This is expected to open up markets for US environmental technology. And for low-income Americans there is a system of energy refunds to ease the impact of higher prices resulting from W-M.
There are physical reasons that the Energy Information Administration is now forecasting that renewables will provide just over 12% of our electric energy supply in 2020, nearly all from hydro and burning biomass. Wind and solar are at just 2.4% in 2020, and they will not get renewables to the 20% commanded by W-M. Renewables lack the energy density and cost benefit of fossil fuels and fissionable nuclear material. Legislative laws rarely override the laws of physics.
Global warming is real. It is time to grow our nuclear fleet and time to tax fossil fuels to provide the revenue for a world-class, electric-powered public transport system. The marketplace will then provide the remaining objectives of W-M without its massive new bureaucracy.
Rolf Westgard
St. Paul, Minn.
