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The Failed State of US Climate Change Policy
The Waxman-Markey climate bill is the best we will get from America until the corruption of public life is addressed
It would be laughable anywhere else. But, so everyone says, the Waxman-Markey bill which is likely to be passed in Congress today or tomorrow, is the best we can expect - from America.
The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations. Like the UK's climate change act (pdf) the US bill calls for an 80% cut by 2050, but in this case the baseline is 2005, not 1990. Between 1990 and 2005, US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose from 5.8 to 7bn tonnes.
The cut proposed by 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill's measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it's printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.
There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There's a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.
Like the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), Waxman-Markey would oblige companies to buy only a small proportion (15%) of their carbon permits. The rest will be given away. This means that a resource belonging to everyone (the right to pollute) is captured by industrial interests without public compensation. The more pollution companies have produced, the greater their free allocation will be - the polluter gets paid. It also means, if the ETS is anything to go by, that the big polluters will be able to make windfall profits by passing on the price of the permits they haven't bought to their consumers.
In one respect the bill actually waters down current legislation, by preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating coal-burning power stations. If the new coal plants planned in the US are built, it's hard to see how even the feeble targets in this bill can be met, let alone any targets proposed by the science.
Even so, I would like to see the bill passed, as it at least provides a framework for future improvements. But why do we expect so little from the US? Why do we treat the world's most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?
You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out. Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. The ranking Republican on the House energy and commerce committee is Joe Barton, the man who in 2005 launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. Like those of many of his peers, his political career is kept on life support by the fossil fuel and electricity companies. He returns the favour by vociferously denying that manmade climate change exists.
A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama's real challenge.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllThe Corporatocracy is a threat to all humankind, and life itself. Why do we let them keep on breathing?
Help end "Corporate Personhood": see both http://www.change.org/ideas/view_idea/end_corporate_personhood
and http://www.change.org/ideas/view/end_corporate_personhood
No, this is OUR real challenge. Obama, Corporate Tool that he is, would no more seriously challenge the energy and profit-care corporations than he would the banksters of Wall Street who financed his campaign. The same is true for all but a handful of "our" Representatives and Senators.
But anthropogenic climate chaos is of a much larger order of magnitude because it affects all life on the planet, and the U.S. is one of the worst contributors to it.
Greed and ignorant ideology trump sense, justice, and compassion. That is the human tragedy.
Unless we can limit campaign contributions to individuals only, and end lobbying, we are literally "cooked". And, since our mostly corrupted Congress writes the laws, there is very little hope that will ever change.
ED ,every thing else hinges on that one issue and as a result should be number one on the progressive agenda. Public financing of Federal and State elections with strict limits on spending.I think if those principals were adhered to lobbys would have no more influence than constituent pressure and K Street would fire all the lobbyists.Congessmen and Senators could spend thier time doing the peoples work instead of dialing for dollars.Maybe the congresscritters would find time to read some of these nightmare bills they vote for too!
After we get public financing then we can worry about election reform ,uniform ballot access,banning the electoral college,verified voting,instant run off elections and details like that.We can't keep having $Billion elections . There are enough billionaires out there that without spending limits ,someone is gonna buy themself a term in office soon.Oh I forgot a few N.E. mayors and Governors have already done that! peace
The corruption in American public life is part of the downside of the Freedom of Speech we like so much - harmful speech is difficult to suppress.
Ending corporate personhood will be an important step, but probably won't be enough.
Help end "Corporate Personhood": see both http://www.change.org/ideas/view_idea/end_corporate_personhood
and http://www.change.org/ideas/view/end_corporate_personhood
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat??????
Elites controlling things for their $$$ benefit has happened throughout history in lots of different cultures. A major part of the way it is accomplished is to stifle those (the vast majority) who lose out, by various means including violence of different types and.....stifling free speech.
We don't have too much, we don't have enough free speech. Try prostesting with vigor against gov't policy and see what happens.
Corporate personhood (as you put it) is but one of the ways of tilting the balance horrifically towards the tiny minority of the filthy rich, and away from the majority.
Stop eating meat and global warming could fix itself in 2 years. Here's an article on animal agriculture- the giant cow in the living room. some statistics and solutions
http://www.treeoflife.nu/article.php?p_id=33
The death drive of savage capitalism will end up killing us all.
WOW.
Excellent posts are dead on target. Corporate personhood is the root of the deepest problems we have.
It elevates the wrong people to the top of our system for the wrong reasons.
We don't get appropriate responses to threats because the solutions disturb the status quo.
The corporatist elite may agree that climate change is a real problem, but they are still convinced that it can be successfully addressed while making a handsome profit. Like setting up a concession booth on the sinking Titanic.
This is indeed the moment in human history which will decide the name of the last branch of the human tree---homosapiens...or homocleverass.
CIVILIZATION
I wondered some things the other day and shared with you what they were and today there is another thing to wonder about and that is: What is the civilization that everyone aspires to? It seems that throughout history that people who have been supposedly civilized the one thing that is common to all is that they acquired things and the more things they had the more they thought they were “more” civilized than any other people that they could have contact with. When they reached a point where there were not enough things they encouraged their leaders to raise an army so that they could go and get more things and they could show other peoples how civilized people do things and if they had no desire to learn how to be civilized they were removed and collateral damage was the norm. When the leaders saw how easy it was to sway the people with things it became easy to control them and push them into ideas and actions that were against their own self interest. Power corrupts.
War, civilization, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing
War, civilization, what is it good for absolutely nothing, say it again y’all
War, civilization good God what is it good for absolutely nothing, listen to me
Oooh war, civilization I despise because it means destruction of innocent lives.
War, civilization, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker
War, civilization, friend only to the undertaker
It’s an enemy to all mankind
The point of war, civilization blows my mind
Who wants to die?
War, civilization what is it good for?
As you can see I took some deep liberties with Edwin Starr’s song, hope he doesn’t mind. We are nothing new under the sun; are we going to have a short shelf life? Tony 6/25/2009
Obama is looking more and more like a corporate shill. It's hard not to feel hoodwinked after his brilliant and inspiring campaign last year. In retrospect, it appears more like brilliant deception and hollow rhetoric.
Big Oil and Big Coal are "too big to fail" at neutralizing any meaningful global heating legislation. The country who placed a man on the moon 40 years ago this summer is now the most corrupt and regressive of the industrialized world. Almost too shameful for words.
San D;It is shame that you can taste and disgust that is consuming.Tony
Monbiot wrote:
"Why do we treat the world's most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?"
The "powerful" part is easy to demonstrate, but can you give us some examples of "innovative" (aside from incomprehensible schemed to make money with only money).
I am an EV experimenter, and all the innovations used in my EV's - notably the affordable large-capacity LiFePO4 batteries, come from China. The battery management electronics from fellow experimenters in their garages.
Maybe Monbiot should consider the other side of your thesis - that the US is indeed a "failed" state which retains the outward appearance of a first-world nation only due to residual effects of past, more economically egalitarian times.
pjd412,glad you are working on EVs.Why don't you check out the guy who started Zero electric motorcycles.He designs and builds his own batteries for the bikes and they are no more toxic than the salt and Lithium inside them.America may be a failing state but has only failed when we give up on her. peace
Last night was movie night at our little land trust, and one of the films was a documentary called Global Warning. It wasn't very good in my opinion. I was distressed but not surprised to hear the new guy, a libertarian, questioning the science and repeating tropes about "40,000 scientists who signed a document stating they don't believe it", etc. Denialism is alive and well in this country. It enables the corporate-government-media complex to go on ignoring the problem (Waxman-Markey is a way of pretending to deal with it, delaying any real effort). Yes, corporate personhood is at the root of the problem, but the Establishment, as they used to call the corporate-government-media complex, has built such a successful self-protective shell around itself that at this point it's clear there is nothing we can do to break in--only catastrophe can save us now, because without a catastrophe to break that shell, any attempt at revolution will be met easily with violence, with the support of most of the thoroughly hoodwinked public. Given the crises bearing down on us--overpopulation and overconsumption together putting us at a point where we consume 23% beyond a sustainable level, and growing; climate change; and fossil fuel depletion, the likelihood of such catastrophe coming soon is high. Let's just hope it comes in the form of a disease, so the rest of this beautiful world is affected as little as possible. War, especially nuclear war, would be terribly destructive. Societal breakdown without reduction in our numbers would lead to very ugly scenes worldwide as warlords rushed into the vaccuum left by the current criminal class running governments, and competition over resources becomes very bloody.
That video actually left me feeling more hopeful as it alleged that the worst extinction event in history, 250 million years ago, was caused by a warming that went beyond the worst projected for this one--and 5% of species still survived, and life has developed amazing variety and complexity since then. So there is hope that another intelligent species will arise on the ashes of our civilization, and who knows? Maybe the next one will also be wise.
"Why do we treat the world's most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?"
Because the U.S. IS a failed state. I believe Noam Chomsky wrote a book called Failed States and established the US as one, not that it isn't perfectly obvious to the dedicated Common Dreams reader. The US refuses to guarantee health care for all, letting 22,000 (conservative) die in the streets every year so that insurance companies can reap massive profits; the US refuses to take seriously the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and work towards a world where ALL nuclear weapons are banned; the US cannot even pass a meaningful climate protection bill, though its people are the most wasteful consumers of energy in the world, and we stand on the brink of truly catastrophic changes as a result; the US puts more than half of its tax dollars -- and spends more than the combined military budgets of the entire world -- on a gargantuan military machine and says it intends to dominate the earth, air, sea and space for the rest of time; the US govt. engages in serial mass-murder campaigns, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has killed a million people --- need I go on? How much more FAILED can a state be?