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Update (as of 2:30 EDT): HR 2454 has narrowly cleared a procedural hurdle, 217-205, and seems headed for final approval–but it will be close. A final roll call is expected sometime this afternoon. [Ed.]
Whatever happened, it was bad. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road envisioned an apocalypse that didn’t kill civilization so much as render it insane. It was literary hyperbole for the sake of allegory. So is this.
Lawmakers in Washington: Please for just one moment pretend that the above scenario is possible, that you are characters in the prequel, and do the right thing on this climate bill that you’re about to vote on.
You’ve heard it all before. We are in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions this planet has seen thus far, and still people have the audacity to hope for profit over salvation.
I wonder–perhaps with Cormac McCarthy, perhaps alone–if this audacity will cease to govern the choices we make as a society when bands of erstwhile parishioners and plumbers and bankers and bowling alley attendants and suitcase salepeople and itinerant bachelors wander the streets looking for anyone who isn’t “one of them” to bonk on the head and eat. I tend to doubt it these days.
The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill—a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act, ACES, H.R. 2454—will likely get voted up or down today unless it’s looking really bad and Pelosi decides to put it off for a while. It needs to garner 218 votes in the House of Representatives to pass. As it stands, there are a lot of scared politicians out there who are none too sure. Nancy Pelosi is doing a good job under trying circumstances. The whips are out in full force. David Axelrod has been clear.
President Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, delivering a stern warning on Thursday to members attending the Democratic whip meeting.
"If this goes down, it shows we can’t govern," Axelrod said, according to one person in attendance.
No one wants to say it in the mainstream coverage, but truly, what is at stake here is an environmental Armageddon. If you haven’t seen the movies and the interactive maps, you should. The information is out there, and it is clear. Estimates of the number of people who will be displaced by natural disasters or rising sea levels vary from 50 million by 2010 to hundreds of millions or even one billion by 2050. The number of deaths caused by starvation due to changing weather patterns and the inability of the world’s farmers to keep up with demand is unknowable, but it is certainly in the hundreds of millions if not billions.
We are looking down the barrel of unfettered expansionism, and it is our own desire for more of everything that will pull the trigger if we can’t break this carbon-coughing obsession with an obsolete and dangerous way of life.
Now to climb down from the soapbox and look at this flimsy reed of a bill everyone is fretting over like a nervous laboratory chimpanzee trying to please an implacable lab attendant. Egad. Farmers this week said they needed special exemptions. There was talk of trapping cow farts and such—all of which is fine and good—but much more talk about how the Department of Agriculture (famously backward-thinking and reckless about environmental issues) would have to oversee carbon offsets for farmers. Really? By the same token, I would like oversight on Waxman-Markey.
Few who are “serious” about saving us from ourselves as regards the wholesale destruction of the planet have a high opinion of this bill. This bill is not worth a damn when it comes to the problems we face. Sure it’s great that some semblance of clean energy and “solution”-oriented thinking has hit the political mainstream. But again, are we really arguing about this? You want to make a difference, it’s going to hurt people.
Sure money is tight. A solution will make money all the more scarce for families barely making ends meet. Everyone needs to swallow hard, and grow up a little. It is what it is.
What do we get for the expenditure? Not so much with the present bill. Maybe not enough. But still: Waxman-Markey requires that 6 percent of electricity come from renewables by 2012, and 20 percent of electricity from renewables by 2020. There would be a 3 percent cut in carbon emission by 2012, a 17 percent cut by 2020, a 42 percent cut by 2030, and more than an 80 percent cut by 2050.
All of this cutting will create a huge number of green enterprise jobs. Energy costs will actually decrease in the long run, but as mentioned already and mumbled over and over by Blue Dog Democrats who remain on the fence, there will be associated costs in the short-term.
Whether it is farm lobbies moaning about the cost of diesel and electricity—note they get a complete pass on the off-gassing catastrophe that is rising from their feedlots—or whether we’re talking about lawmakers nervous about passing the expense on to voting citizens, we’re concerned here mainly with a quagmire of self-interest and self-serving bias that truly endangers life on the planet.
George Lakoff rarely rises to the level of Luntz-like poetry, but here no poetry is required: Pay a lot now, or pay much more later.
The bleak landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book are not that far off in the future if we don’t get a handle on this problem. And while Waxman-Markey is weak medicine for a very sick planet, it’s a whole lot better than taking the poor orb behind the Milky Way and shooting it.
Pass the Waxman-Markey bill please, so we can get a foothold in the mountain of a problem rising up before us.
From Air America
25 Comments
This bill is not the answer. It will allow wind farms all over the country. Since they can’t be built close to the general population…miles and miles of transmission lines will be necessary. The reasons they can’t be built close to people are…they are a documented health hazard..causing seizures, irregular heart beat and migraine head aches. There are other ailments as well . Google Dr Nina Pierpont’s work
The turbines only produce energy when the wind blows. If it blows too hard they shut down as they are at risk to catch fire from friction.The energy can’t be stored. The wind does not blow during peak usage. No insurance company will insure them.Why build them. Lots of govt perks. Like within 5 years the cost of them is paid for by US. The transmission lines are built by US.There is a lot of money to be made in utilities.
The transmission lines may need to go through your property. If you don’t want them …your property can be taken by emminent domain. States have no voice. It is up to FERC…which doesn’t have a real great track record.
Actually Obama and Axelrod want the bill so Obama will look good when he goes to the Copenhagen conference.
I’ve been doing some reading in this area recently for a different project. Obama has never supported one of the most effective tools for reducing carbon, a carbon tax. During his campaign, he favored cap and trade with a 100% of permits to be sold. He now favors giving 35% of them away. The Waxman bill represents a further compromise.
Irreversible climate change is already here. The slowness of our and other governments to act make it likely that the climate change will be far larger than it needs to be, i.e. we will cross a tipping point in the next few years.
I generally don’t write on longer range matters because I don’t think people like to think about them. We have already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our population. This is evidenced by how we are blowing through the planet’s resources. World population in 2050 under current trends will be 9 billion. The likely world population in 2100, unless there are major new contributions to the equations, will be under a billion. That indicates tremendous strife, suffering, and death in the period 2050-2100. We can already see the first signs of this in the first chronically failed states (Somalia, Afghanistan) and regions (Central Africa}.
Amen. Wish more people were more aware.
We are indeed in the midst of a mass extinction event. All we can do is partially mitigate the effects of it and the true scope of it won’t be known for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. People have such a short time on this planet that it’s almost outside our abilities to perceive what catastrophic changes our pollution is making to the ecosystem. In end, it may cost humanity our ability to survive here but the Earth itself will heal, adapt and go on. Just like it’s done over and over throughout and between other mass exticntion events.
Just because all of this may be true, is no reason not to act and act immediately. If your house is on fire and has already been severely damaged, I don’t know any sane person who would either let it continue to burn if they have the ability to mitigate the damage or throw more fuel on so it burns faster and hotter. The people who throw up their hands and say, “Oh well, it’s already too late so whatever we can do now is pointless”, are arguably more of an obstacle to the efforts to contain the damage than are those who refuse to acknowledge the problem.
Thanks for your diatribe against wind power. Perhaps you should move to the gulf coast of Texas where you would only have to put up with toxins in the atmosphere and carcinagens in the water. I’m not defending wind power, any solution will consist of many facets but all you’ve done is bad mouth wind energy without offering any constructive solutions.
I can get that from any Republican…
Well said. I wonder how much the RNC pays people to come to the Lake and spread Rethug crap.
Thanks, although it’s not a cheerful prognosis for the patient. The dismal plight of Afghanistan and Central Africa has certainly been made worse by outside interference.
The emphasis should be on conservation, above all, not the gimmicky shit.
OT: Thanks for the input over at Redd’s squirrel den. It’s been a long time since I ever witnessed such density in an otherwise reasonably intelligent headbone. Thanks for use of yer wwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaambulance. ;->
ALWAYS and forever! Conservation is mandatory. I don’t understand those who keep trumpeting one or another fix-all gimmick. It’s going to take using every tool in the box.
What is the price to keep Florida above sea level? If you don’t mind moving US citizens out of Florida, what about Bangladesh? Let’s think about that population forced to migrate, and to where? India? The Indians don’t want another batch of Muslims.
There is no particularly good reason the energy can’t be stored. Think about two reservoirs with a 100 ft altitude differential. When the wind blows, you use the excess power to pump water (or some other fluid, water is the most likely for obvious reasons) into the upper reservoir using the same turbines you use to generate power. When you need power but the wind isn’t blowing, release water from the upper reservoir to generate electricity.
You don’t like building that sort of hydrosystem? Build flywheels… spin them up when you have excess power, spin them down when you need power. Any system that has potential energy can be used to store energy. No, you can’t store it losslessly, the laws of thermodynamics don’t permit it. But good engineering can reduce the losses, and it’s a hell of lot better than dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, conservation does not have a heavily funded lobby, meaning there’s nothing in it for Congresspersons scrounging for campaign funds.
That being said, conservation does not need massive infusions of dollars. It needs education and a reordering of personal priorities.
One of the better features of the bill is added support for energy efficiency. One of the effects of that is a prediction that electricity demand will decrease and thus decrease the amount of new generation, including renewables, that gets built. This has caused some consternation among supporters because they want more renewables, not less. The result seems counterintuitive, given how wind/solar produced electricity is dispatched, but there is a plausible argument that the increased conservation could have this effect.
The renewable energy standard has been watered down quite a bit — a few states, but not many, have higher standards, so it’s a tradeoff for a not very aggressive standard.
In the absence of a carbon tax, it’s probably a good idea, IMO, to get the framework of cap and trade in place, and then try to ratchet the caps down in the future.
Obama wanted 100 % of the trade allowances auctioned, and he would have used the money from the auctions to fund other good stuff; W-M bill allocates about 85 % of the allowances for free, to various groups, so they get the value and the govt loses the revenues, although some of the free allowances are to worthwhile things (and others not).
On the “offsets” issue, the way it works is that if a polluting company needs to purchase allowances to meet it’s part of the cap, it can buy them in the auction, make emissions cuts itself, or it can submit “offsets,” which are enforceable commitments to do things in non-regulated sectors to reduce carbon emissions in that other sector. For example, you can save a rain forest from destruction. There are foreign and domestic “offsets” possible, and they’re supposed to be real, enforceable, etc. One type of offset is to improve farming practices in the US to produce less carbon emissions.
One debate was over who should control how these agricultural offsets were measured/enforced. Environmental advocates trusted only the EPA to do this, thinking they’d be tougher; the farm-belt reps wanted the Agriculture Department to be in charge, and the Aggies won, which means that the validity of these offsets is likely to be less reliable. It may also mean that if the Ag Dept gets to define what the offsets are worth, it will mean people buying the offsets might have to pay more to get them, thus subsidizing corporate agriculture. That’s what it took to get the Aggie reps’ votes.
So the current bill is a bunch of compromises, with some good things, other things not so good, and it has split the environmental and scientific community about whether it’s still good enough to support or so flawed that it should be opposed. It’s a judgment call and friends are fighting friends over this, which is a shame.
There are numerous “pumped storage” hydro systems in place, and they are used to “store” energy as you describe. However, their cost-effectiveness is not certain, because it takes more energy to pump the water back up the hill to the upper reservoir than you get from releasing the water through the turbines on the way down. So it’s a net energy loser. It may be “cost-effective,” because the value of energy at night when you’re pumping is much lower than the value of the generating energy during peak hours. Hence, pumped storage units are used mostly for meeting peak demand.
If the pumping is done at night, the chances are you’re using coal plants to generate the energy to do that, so the net energy increase could be accompanied by a net increase in carbon emissions, but I haven’t seen a study on that possibility.
While there are other technically feasible storage options, there still don’t seem to be any clear winners for storing lots of energy. That hasn’t been that big a problem with relatively low levels of wind. But the more you get, the more there will be times when the level of demand is so low that you have to turn off the wind generators and keep running the coal plants. I’ve seen examples of that at PJM, and it happens during early morning pickup when there’s literally too much generation, the price drops to negative numbers, and the wind guys shut off until the price comes back up.
Milly isn’t opposed to wind power. Milly is opposed to anything that isn’t “drill baby, drill” it sounds like to me. At least that’s the gist I got. It wasn’t a suggestion or even a specific complaint, it was a laundry list of questionable claims from someone opposed to change in the status quo.
And just when did you read this Bill?
What time did you start?
When did you finish?
How many Pages?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, even if this makes it out of the House, you KNOW what the Senate will do to it.
It seems we have a death wish.
It’s the same with Health care, the Senate is going to cave, you watch. Although I get disgusted with NYT this is a snapshot of everyone who’s lined up against Healthcare:
Obama and Congress Clash on How to Pay for Health Care
The corporations don’t want to lose a dime to any “change”.
I’ve been an environmental activist since I was 14 years old. And I’ve gotta say, this is one of the reasons I use Kassandra as my user name whenever I can. DOOM!
PS: Micheal Jackson couldn’t have died at a more inopportune time; even Sanford’s peccadilloes have taken a backseat to the endless coverage of Jackson by everybody. (funny, they never paid attention to him while he was alive, now this is the MOST important thing going on)while some of the most important bills of our lifetimes are making their way thru Congress.
That’s some heavy negative backlash without any real proof other than a book.
Wind, in combo with solar and any OTHER newgreen features will be our salvation.
If we have one.
Your naysay seems to me, a bit shortsighted and well, not problem solving.
But it’s still a free country so far. And yer entitled to yer voice.
I don’t know enough about the energy bill to break it down line by line, but over all, I hear it’s as good as we can get at this point.
MY problem with it, and other ‘reforms’ up for grabs is that the PTB have lobbied our elected offals and the deals are done and we the people have NO clue as to what was sold out from under us.
But denying wind power and it’s potential as you do, is NOT part of my suspicion of how things are getting done.
Just sayin.
I’ll amen that amen for Hugh’s thoughts.
It’s hard NOT to see losses in everything we need to survive in the next 100 years, and that’s discounting a nuke war or two . . . famine, weather, loss of water supplies alone could really do us in it would appear.
Me and mine will be around, willing, till about 2030 or so . . . wishing the rest good luck till then and after.
Hoss, those migrations are uncontrollable, ‘cept by outright military force.
I don’t think there’s historical precedence for that option, either. Not for weather.
For war and such? Sure. But not for weather. So short of military intervention, populations WILL have to move.
And that too, will add to the mix and mystery and tragedy. In ALL ways possible. Religious, cultural, language, and ability to subsist by all.
I see the migrations and their inevitability, as, inevitable. Part of the equation the planet will have to deal with.
I see lots of dead, starving people. Sooner than before I’ll die, too. Be interesting to see how militarism statehood deals with it all. I mean, are we gonna let the equatorials go north into USA as resources deplete and heat goes up and water goes away?
Badda boom, badda bing. Thanks hoss, for makin that so simple to grok. Spot on.
Hmm, as patterns go hoss, it would seem this bill opens up the door for the speculators and hedge funds and short sellers to game the system all over again . . .
Again, without reform, there can BE no change, none.
And so far, in the big picture, that’s what I see.
No reforms, ergo, no real reforms.
I’m working on a post about the patterns, and how they cross over so easily from banking/finance to healthcare, to energy, to all issues we are UP against, and gonna die from if we don’t change.
As always, thanks for all you share. Like so many other FDL’ers it helps many of us readers to lead us thru our homework. ‘Preciate it all. H/T.
“and the wind guys shut off until the price comes back up.”
And therein lies the pattern that screws us time and time again.
The profit motive, the profit incentive, the profit NEED!
Unfettered capitalism as is has proven to be insufficient to serve the masses in an equitable means.
We did good for awhile, here in USA. But it’s gone the way of most societies. The rich and powerful got it all, and blew it for the rest of the populous.
And we’re getting blown, hugely. All across the globe. (/sexualmetaphor)
The patterns are there . . . all there.
Change is a hard thing to find, move and use.
So much opposition . . . only people in the streets will change it, and I don’t see that happening.
So, it’s the slope down, as the have’s continue to drive us into the have nots and ignore mama nature and loss of renewable’s.
Our elected offals are immune to the reality we ask them to see.
And I don’t think we have time enough to elect new one’s that do. Sigh.
Always love your comments, as one of Teh Pups.
Here’s to all of you Pups.