Energy Bill Priorities pt 1: Climate Change

Even among environmentalists, conservation has a wide-array of goals and there has always been considerable debate on what steps to prioritize in the defense of the natural world. Now that we've got an energy bill in Congress, it's finally time to figure out some coherent objectives.

Climate change is all the rage today, yet it still evokes considerable controversy. In fact, in a recent Gallup poll, for the first time since being asked the question in 1984, more Americans say that economic growth takes precedence over environmental protection. As Teryn Norris, Project Director at the Breakthrough Institute, says: "In the midst of economic crisis, Americans are far more worried about keeping their jobs and paying their energy bills than they are about global warming."

However, many don't feel the need to draw a distinction...

Lester Brown, perhaps today's premier environmental spokesman and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, has advocated a carbon tax:

The most efficient means of restructuring the energy economy to stabilize atmospheric CO2 levels is a carbon tax. Paid by the primary producers—the oil or coal companies—it would permeate the entire fossil fuel energy economy. The tax on coal would be almost double that on natural gas simply because coal has a much higher carbon content. As noted in Chapter 11, we propose a worldwide carbon tax of $240 per ton to be phased in at the rate of $20 per year between 2008 and 2020.

This is perhaps the most hardcore policy towards attacking climate change. It holds emitters accountable in dollar amounts proportional to their ecological perpetration. Don't spew the grime, if you can't pay the fine.

The most popular policy geared towards climate change is cap-and-trade. Earth Defense Fund's Fred Krupp discusses the vast benefits of such a program, particuarly as opposed to a carbon tax:

We can’t find an example of any air-pollution problem ever solved without a quantitative limit on the pollution that can be dumped into the air, and that’s what a cap is. It’s an enforceable guarantee to the public. Tax proposals don’t measure up [to binding emissions limits], so they don’t spur the innovations and the emissions reductions we need. Moreover, if a [carbon] tax proposal were to be taken seriously, the number of exemptions would be huge; consider our 17,000 page IRS code.

Admirably, the President has come out strong in prioritizing his own cap-and-trade program, which would decrease U.S. carbon emissions by 20% below the 2005 level by 2020 and 83% by 2050. Obama seeks to auction 100% of emission allowances generating about $150 billion in 10 years to be invested specifically in green jobs and technology. While the investment in energy is an integral part of his plan, the forefront of the cap-and-trade idea is climate change.

Several environmental experts as well as the Prez himself have prioritized attacking global warming, while certainly collecting revenue and stimulating the economy. The key is that the framing of such policies, "carbon tax" and "cap-and-trade" place climate change as paramount in our economic policy objectives, a noble goal and I think I speak for tree-huggers everywhere when I say...finally.