In a meeting with reporters, Sen. Richard Lugar says he believes it is doubtful Congress will act on climate change.
“The votes just haven’t been there, and I’m not sure they are now,” Lugar said to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
Coming from a moderate, this is not good news for greens. It is unfortunate that we will not be able to pass meaningful climate change legislation, but the current draft of Waxman-Markey is a disaster.
The Economist makes an excellent case against it:
As a result the bill is now too weak in three crucial ways. First, it envisages America cutting carbon-dioxide emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 (down from 20% in the original draft). Europe, by contrast, is aiming to cut its emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 (and by 30%, if the rest of the world makes similarly serious efforts). Second, the purpose of a cap-and-trade system is to introduce a carbon price. But the bill sets a ceiling of $28 a tonne on the price of carbon—too low to change behaviour enough.
Third, under a cap-and-trade system, the government issues permits to pollute. The administration had wanted 100% of permits to be auctioned, but the bill would hand most of them out free (a third to electricity companies, which is nice for coal; only 2% to oil companies). When that happened in Europe, power-generation companies passed the cost of buying permits on to consumers and pocketed the value of the ones they had been given free. In order to avoid such an outcome, the bill specifies that the value of free permits must be passed on to consumers. But if consumers are protected from price increases, they will have no incentive to cut back on carbon consumption—which is one of the goals of the scheme.
Conservatives need to begin embracing measures to slow climate change, but Waxman-Markey is not the answer. We should offer effective market-based solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, too many conservatives still deny climate change is real.