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Summertime, and the living is easy

August 10, 2009

…and members of the U.S. Congress have left Washington for a few weeks’ living in their home districts. Trouble is, they didn’t finish the job before they left.

The House of Representatives spent a good part of the year taking a good idea (the President’s target of 25% of electricity from renewable sources by 2025) and doing a bad job with it:

- Their bill, the Waxman-Markey ‘ACES’ bill, (bill number HR2454) calls only for 20% renewables by 2020, while the Senate’s version - the ‘ACELA’ bill (bill number S1462) - only looks for 15% by 2021!

- In response to the Obama-Biden requirement that all carbon emission allowances be auctioned to fund clean energy development and help citizens cope with energy bills, the ACES bill gives away some 85% of carbon emission allowances to polluting industries, while the ACELA bill ignores climate altogether.

- Neither bill creates uniform net metering or interconnection standards for retail and commercial customers, leaving us - still - without a national framework for distributed generation within which a healthy solar market can flourish.

It’s remarkable just how far from its original intent (and the minimum needed to make a dent in the energy/climate problem) this Congressional bill has fallen. Some are saying that the bill, in its present form, will not lead to any deeper emissions reductions than are likely to occur under current and projected state-level programs. And on the renewable energy front, alternative compliance payments are set at such a low level in both versions of the bill that utilities may find it easier and cheaper to pay (and pass on) these penalties than to actually develop renewables.

How could this have happened?

It happened because Congresspersons have been treating the energy/climate issue like any other issue - an opportunity to gain advantage in their own parochial sphere, irrespective of the importance of the broader issue or even whether the broader issue is effectively addressed.

- Under pressure from Big Coal and energy-intensive firms, legislators from industry-heavy states have forced big concessions on emission allowances from the bill’s framers.

- Farm state legislators, far from decrying the giveaways, have demanded a greater share of them for their states.

- Representatives from the U.S. Southeast, aware that their solar and wind resources are inferior to those of the Southwest or Midwest, are convinced the renewable energy titles in the bill don’t apply to them.

- Worried that jobs would move from the East to the windy Midwest, or to the sunny Southwest, if FERC were to use its increased power under the bill to approve interstate transmission lines, lawmakers from east coast constituencies killed a large part of that vital measure.

In other words, Congress has treated clean energy and climate stabilization as issues that can be compromised, bargained down, and used as a vehicle for securing local advantage. If a useful bill is passed in the process, that’s acceptable; if not, it’s not the end of the world.

The trouble is, it could be. Because this bill is not about naming a state flower, it’s about taking determined action to keep humanity’s only habitat viable and sustainable. And Congress is treating it as business-as-usual.

It will also be an interesting test of President Obama’s commitment to the issue. He knows the U.S. must arrive at the Copenhagen ’summit’ in December with a credible, effective plan for climate change mitigation; will he be content with Congress desanguinating what was once a healthy patient, or will he use avenues open to his Administration to administer a much-needed transfusion?

Time will tell; we just wish we had more of it.

(If you would like to write a letter to your newspaper — now that your homebound Congressperson is presumably reading it — demanding that Congress finishes the job it started, you can go here to find talking points, editors’ addresses, and names of your Congressional delegation).

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