"Moral Issue to Preserve God's Creation"

The Good News

Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the imperative for the new global warming legislation as coming not only from national security, health and economic concerns, but in terms of the "moral issue to preserve God's creation" without hurting the poor.

Chairman Henry A. Waxman of the Energy and Commerce Committee and Chairman Edward J. Markey of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee today released a draft of clean energy legislation that will create jobs, help end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and combat global warming. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) is a comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy that charts a new course towards a clean energy economy. ...

Chairman Markey said this morning that Pelosi gave them a mandate to have clean energy legislation on the president's desk by the time of the Copenhagen Climate Council, making for a tight schedule, "so President Obama can go to Copenhagen as the leader, not the laggard."

This is Pelosi's flagship issue, according to Markey, and she means for the bill to be inevitable.

Markey and Pelosi both emphasized that it's important that Congress address the issue instead of leaving it to the EPA. Pelosi said that it other countries needed to know that clean energy mandates were the law of the land, and wouldn't be overturned by a change in administration. Markey said that the regulatory process also can't comprehensively address the range of industry and public concerns that Congress can.

Biofuel

I was able to ask them their thoughts on promoting biofuels, in light of concerns about their displacement of food crops and limited land availability. The new legislation does include biomass in the mix. Does Iowa corn, I wondered to myself, still own this issue?

Pelosi said that perhaps some of this was an issue when the focus was mainly on corn, but that the people were moving to cellulosics and crops, like switchgrass, that don't compete with food. Markey further added that the idea of the bill was to push towards electric cars, and a range of geothermal and other energy sources.

It must be granted that moving away from burning corn is good. Though even when cellulosic technology becomes ready for market, which it isn't now, it won't necessarily address land displacement. If switchgrass, or some other cellulosic ethanol feedstock crop, is more profitable than a food crop, it might well be grown on land that was formerly used for food.

This has already been reported with jatropha in Africa. The great thing about jatropha is that it can grow on land that's otherwise useless for agriculture, but it's not limited to that habitat. Farmers looking for a good cash crop are free, and rightly, to decide they'd rather plant fuel.

There's a large hazard in a globalized economy of pitting suburban Americans' private vehicles against what the rest of the world can pay for food. And to be fair, it isn't so clear that suburban Americans will be able to afford that tradeoff. More of them are lined up in foodbanks every month now, and a distressing number are migrating to tent cities.

Moving towards electric cars can address land displacement, as it can directly reduce the need for liquid fuel, but how fast will that happen? The tougher carbon emission standards included in the bill won't kick in until 2023, when the standards passed in 2007 will expire.

There's time to negotiate on all of this, though, and it seems like Congress is at least considering the question more thoughtfully.

The Bad News

As usual, though, there are some large polluter giveaways in the bill. How much have we got to bribe our country's aristocratic m*f*ers so that they'll stop ruining everybody's lives, anyway? (We could call it the *hole tax, but their greed is truly without bottom, so that might be anatomically incorrect.)

Overall, this bill will probably be a better job creation engine than a truly climate-friendly policy that respects the tremendous peril of our situation.

That's unfortunate, because the climate is no respecter of political constraints. Though we need a better source of new jobs, so at least Congress will be up to some good.

(Photo credit: alykat on Flickr.)