Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
How Weak is the American Power Act?
While the ocean floor spews viscous goo into the Gulf of Mexico, environmentalists are taking a hard look at what was supposed to be the sweeping climate change bill that would liberate America from its fossil-fuel addiction. So far, mixed reviews from the environmental community suggest that they're looking at the bill they got and still seeking the bill they wanted.
While the new legislation isn't a carbon copy of the toxic bills penned by the industry under Bush-Cheney, the American Power Act still fails to cut carbon in a meaningful way, according to more radical environmentalists. Those deficiencies risk overshadowing the economic and job-creation initiatives, which are in turn dwarfed by handouts to polluters.
The bill sets flaccid standards for ratcheting down greenhouse gas emissions and establishes a cap-and-trade system—the centrist approach that the Democrats have embraced. Critics point out that the bill shamelessly coddles dirty industries by encouraging offshore drilling, nuclear power investment, and more welfare for Big Coal.
According to the official summary, the legislation promises that “Industrial sources will not enter the program until 2016,” and at that point, “energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries receive allowances to offset both their direct and indirect compliance costs.” Then, after ensuring at least a few more years of corporate heel-dragging, the bill addresses subsidies for clean energy:
We also significantly increase incentives for clean technology manufacturing, by expanding the clean energy manufacturing tax credit by $5 billion, providing incentives for the production of advanced vehicles and component parts and funding investments in energy efficiency innovation. Alongside these priorities, we also support community economic adjustment assistance and worker training.
The one sentence devoted to labor reads like a bit of an afterthought. Do advocates see this as the germ of a green-energy boom or a condescending pat on the head?
Green for All praised the bill's support for the Green Construction Careers Demonstration Project, which they say “creates middle-class careers for our most vulnerable communities.” Still, the Demonstration Project is by definition small scale and experimental; the long-term future and scaleability of such initiatives remain in flux.
The national green-labor coalition Apollo Alliance endorsed the bill overall, but vowed to keep pushing for additional measures to ensure that the new green manufacturing jobs are primarily homegrown and not offshored. The Alliance also calls “direct federal assistance to small and mid-sized manufacturers to retool to produce renewable energy systems and components and become more energy efficient.”
So far, it seems like labor-environmental groups are cautiously lining up behind the bill on the assumption that flawed legislation is better than none. But from a long-range perspective, the American Power Act may set the terms for the congressional debate on climate-change policy for years to come, probably to the exclusion of more progressive proposals.
Last year, mainstream environmental groups called for investments in clean-energy R&D in the range of $15 billion per year. Meanwhile, climate wonks in England are demanding a wholesale post-Copenhagen paradigm shift toward earth-conscious models for development.
The Apollo Alliance's own green investment plan also laid out a relatively bold agenda:
It will generate and invest $500 billion over the next ten years and create more than five million high quality green-collar jobs. It will accelerate the development of the nation’s vast clean energy resources and move us toward energy security, climate stability, and economic prosperity. And it will transform America into the global leader of the new green economy.
That tone of ambition is already fading as lawmakers plow ahead with the Kerry-Lieberman proposal. Public Citizen pronounced it dead on arrival:
The Kerry-Lieberman bill represents a missed opportunity. By meeting behind closed doors, the lawmakers empowered corporate polluters to play an oversized role in influencing the legislation to the detriment of the climate and consumers. Barack Obama had it right when he successfully campaigned on a theme of making polluters pay and delivering benefits directly to households.
We need a bill that does not incentivize failed and dangerous technologies like nuclear power and does not enrich utilities at the expense of consumers.
Was labor at the table when polluters and politicians were evidently huddling in private? Now might be a perfect time to elbow their way in, if only to make sure that rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic doesn't get classified as a green job.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllI feel we're at the end of the petroleum era now, with BP's ongoing mess headed out on the currents. Let's drill some more and make more messes.
Let's finally see ourselves as the world sees us, as gluttonous idiots floating in oil addiction. Let's ruin all our coasts and turn the ocean into one big open oil well. We can have purification plants everywhere, half of them separating oil from the water, the other half separating water from oil, so that each village and town has two big hoses, one spewing water laced with petroleum, for our washing, drinking and crop irrigation, the other spewing petroleum for our never ending addiction.
Let the filthy spew, soaked in surfactants, drift away and entually wind up on the coasts of Europe and Africa, so that some country finally invades us and slaughters us to the last person, before we poison our own selves to death, so that the human race might survive at all.
Then the world will finally find the creativity it thinks it lacks now, to move past the age of oil.
"Looking at the bill they got and still seeking the bill they wanted" applies to nearly EVERYTHING that has happened in Washington DC for the past three decades.
The gap between GOT and WANTED just keeps widening.
Sioux Rose
The modus operandi reads EXACTLY like that which gave us the dubious "health care reform" bill. Both behind closed door "negotiations" are sell-outs to big business. I believe this crisis in the Gulf will be the deal-breaker. Whether the citizens of UK and Europe get with the program seeing their waters tainted, or citizens of the Gulf (many thoroughly deluded that Obama is serving socialist interests and contingencies) rise up in arms... business as usual is being interrupted. We are less than 5 months into 2010 and environmental catastrophes keep on showing up to disrupt our lives, as well as the business of oil/war profits as usual. A reckoning that supercedes what takes place behind closed doors is manifesting.
Two more things that will amp up the concern:
1. This was the warmest April and Jan-April on record, of what is likely to be the warmest year on record.
2. This is expected to be a major hurricane year: record number of hurricanes.
Hopefully this confluence of unprecedented events will provide the tipping point in public opinion so desperately needed.
The firing of Van Jones last year should have made it obvious where Obama and the Democratic Party really stand on the environment. There is very little that Obama has supported last year that differs for the better from what Dubya supports and I doubt that this year is any different. From this article, it is safe to conclude that the greenwashing continues and that truly green jobs are dead in the water.
Obamacare proves that Obama can take any Republican program, push it through Congress and convince the Obama cult that he is liberal.
Obama will also fire anybody Glenn Beck tells him to fire and convince the Obama cult that he is liberal.
Cap and trade will not only worsen pollution, it will also provide another commodity for the unregulated banksters to manipulate and create additional meltdowns that require ever more expensive taxpayer-funded bailouts.
President Palin will DRILL BABY DRILL and if U don't like it buy a can of kerosene to keep by your door so when u come back from a walk on the beach you can clean off the tar like back in the 50's and 60's. The Gopers and Demo Blue Doggies hate anything green and will use they're expanded 2nd A rights to shoot it on sight. 1 term Preznit Barry Obummer white Harvard Corp. lawyer will by then be working for BP as they're spokesperson.
Kerry-Lieberman IS likely to be DOA. For this reason and for reasons of political savvy and integrity, the major and minor enviro organizations should line up AGAINST this travesty. A trickle of dollars for alt energy and training is not worth another 2 decades of subsidy for extractive, polluting industries.
Anyway, let's be honest - what good can come from anything bearing Joe Lieberman's name? And Kerry? He is his own argument against himself. There's no help and no hope coming from Congress. Waxman and Markley are far better men than these two clowns and their bill was an atrocity. That's why the enviros withhold support. We should stick to our own, well-concieved, commonsensical and practical proposals, because that is what they are. A carbon tax would work. A 5 year phase out of coal would work; with some bumps in the road, but nothing compared to the alternative. A Manhattan project sized fed-state crash program to build and distribute alt energy, conservation, etc technology and generate new business start-ups would work. F**k the debt; who cares? We're up to our necks anyway. Better going deep in the hole building alt energy than destroying Af-Pak and Iraq.
If anybody had any actual balls in the mainstream enviro groups this would be a no-brainer. Guess that means there really isn't much in the way of brains, either.
I gave up on EDF and NRDC years ago. Fred Krupp is a specious asshole. Carl Pope was kind of limp, but he's gone now. I'll probably keep my Sierra Club card. They do good things locally.
"According to the official summary, the legislation promises that “Industrial sources will not enter the program until 2016,” and at that point, “energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries receive allowances to offset both their direct and indirect compliance costs."
Well of course! More corporate welfare, a/k/a subsidies, so the elite shareholders don't have to lose a penny! The government, if it's still alive, must think that we're going to forget the $$TRILLIONS in bailouts we gave to the banksters, only to get hit with $$BILLIONS and possibly trillions more in welfare to the "energy industry".
Have you read this link?:...http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/gtlong/2010/0514.html...
Does anyone else get this smoke and mirror bullshit where you cant see the train wreck coming until some "future date" like the did with the give away to the insurance co.'s?This is getting to be a signiture with these people and I,for one,if a future date is there already know to say it is garbage. Tony
They act as if it were some economic interests or special interest groups on the other side of this equation instead of nature. As that long ago and oh so prescient commercial, for some kinda margarine, said, "It's not nice to fool [with] Mother Nature."
It's strange that, in the midst of this mess, the Right are freaking out because they're not in power. They're saying their usual things about Obama--he's a socialist; he's weakening our militaery, etc.--completely unaware Obama is a fellow Republican, doing exactly what the Puwanted all along.
As most progressives know, we are witnessing the fruition of Republican policies in the hands of the Democrats. It's driving us nuts to see our party completely taken over by the other side.
Meanwhile, the Right almost literally can't see what's happening. They think the commies are taking over.
PS: "The Mooning of America," a satyre, starring me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HIMTMlqOM
The elites are frantically searching for ways to retrieve their lost control over market demands/opportunities, that were stolen by the people, taken back home, and distributed among local producers for the benefit of local communities.