What to do about Waxman-Markey?

Posted By Christian Brose Thursday, June 25, 2009 - 9:16 PM Share

By Christian Brose

Admittedly, I'm no climate science expert, but I found this piece from Jim Manzi pretty darn persuasive as to why Waxman-Markey -- the American Clean Energy and Security Act -- is a bad bill. It's well worth your time in light of Congress' vote on the bill tomorrow.

EXPLORE:ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT
 

WOLFBOY

3:52 AM ET

June 26, 2009

Not persuasive to me

Mr. Manzi presumes that the bill should only be credited, in a cost-benefit analysis, with savings attributable to resulting US reductions in emissions.

The more appropriate perspective is global - the US must do its share in order for emitting nations as a whole to be expected to reduce emissions.

 

ZATHRAS

4:01 AM ET

June 26, 2009

Waxman-Markey

Waxman-Markey is a bad bill because it tries to cloak the one thing we need to do with a lot of things we don't need to do.

We don't need to regulate carbon emissions, which are by and large a product of energy use. People and businesses using less energy will emit less carbon. We don't need to create a large bureaucracy to administer the artificial market created by W-M's cap-and-trade system, a market made even more complicated than it would be otherwise because of all the sweeteners needed to get it past Congress. We especially don't need camouflage for politicians seeking to be even less accountable than they are already. W-M seeks to create a system, an entity for people to blame when energy gets more expensive -- just so they don't blame members of Congress when gas prices grow up. This one motivation by itself accounts for about 75% of Waxman-Markey's support on the Hill.

But we do need to raise the price of energy. Price is the key to everything we'd like to see happen: higher energy prices mean more conservation, more efficient cars, more incentives for innovative new technologies that don't depend so much on fossil fuels. Higher energy prices also mean a lower trade deficit, and are incidentally a much safer way of reducing our trade deficit that the protectionist measures Congress is likely to pass otherwise.

The key to energy prices can be taxes now, or world energy markets later. The idiot consistency imposed on Republican politicians in particular by the party's permanent campaign apparatus requires that they never support tax increases on anything, but higher energy prices produced by taxation now would leave us better prepared when the inevitable recovery of the global economy forces market prices up. In the meantime, straightforward energy tax increases would raise for the badly indebted federal government revenue that Waxman-Markey as it now stands will not.

Now, are higher energy taxes desirable during a recession? Might they be expected to make it worse? Unfortunately there isn't much doubt that they probably would. Higher global energy prices striking an economy still addicted to cheap energy will also make whatever economy we have in future years worse, a truth we saw illustrated graphically just last summer.

If we knew relatively low energy prices would last forever and have no damaging effects on the environment, there would be a case on the merits for doing nothing -- or for confining our initiatives to throwing more subsidies at research programs, the magic energy beans approach. We know instead that energy prices will not stay low forever, and that the massive energy usage in the United States both increases our economic and political vulnerability and contributes to climate change. The only case for doing nothing in response to this is the one the party campaign infrastructure makes: just let us get through the next election, and then the one after that.

Waxman-Markey represents an effort to do something about climate change while persuading America voters that everything being done is being done to someone else. It will if enacted produce better results than would doing nothing only by accident. The whole debate over climate change and energy dependency in the United States today will one day be seen as a object lesson in the futility of trying to address difficult problems only with popular measures.

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

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