Senate GOP Pushing Energy Bill Socialism?

June 18th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

Senate Republicans have long opposed cap-and-trade legislation to grow clean non-polluting energy (along with all the other legislation they opposed that would do it too). Cap-and-trade is a free market option. Each company can pick the best way for them to become more carbon efficient.

One alternative is top-down command and control: the “socialist” approach that has government mandating standards, rather than just setting a cap for emissions and allowing polluters to trade with each other to fund the ways of reducing pollution.

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Yet, ironically, the Senate GOP is now rejecting the free market option in favor of the very same top-down socialist approach in a command and control bill proposed by Senator Lugar, who appears to be acting in good faith. He is one of the few Republicans who has ever voted for climate and clean energy policy. It is supported by Senator Graham, who hasn’t.

Lugar’s bill is a weaker version of Bingaman’s “energy only” bill that quietly failed its CBO analysis last year (for want of any funding mechanism other than the US taxpayer). Like Bingaman’s bill, Lugar’s would also receive its funding from the taxpayer. (By contrast, cap-and-trade gets the carbon reduction funds from the dirtiest and least innovative polluters in an industry.)

Rather than setting a cap on pollution, Lugar’s bill would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices (albeit mostly at levels that are already the law) putting more faith in government than the free market.

Whether the GOP would actually vote for the bill is not clear: they have previously filibustered almost identical pieces of legislation such as Bingaman’s Renewable Energy Standard about eight times over the last decade. But they might.

Under Lugar’s more lenient “diverse” power standards for utilities, nuclear and coal with carbon capture could also be used to meet the requirements, which might be perfect to rope in the last few knuckle-dragger states like Wyoming that still don’t have an RES (as long as they are willing to store that waste at home) getting them to reduce carbon emissions lower than business as usual.

Probably investors there would pick wind or geothermal over more expensive nuclear or carbon-captured coal anyway, once given a demand for carbon-efficient fuel.

The GOP has backed itself into a corner by opposing cap and trade, which is actually the more flexible option for the rugged individualist. As David Leonhard points out in a New York Times piece exposing the strange new GOP preference for socialist policy, they are turning their backs on acid rain policy they themselves devised in 1990 under President GHW Bush, to make coal plants look for alternatives to emitting the sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain.

With a price on emissions, the plants easily found their own solutions. Then, as now, with this time carbon free fuel, ready-to-deploy alternatives exist in abundance.

It remains to be seen whether the twice as fossil-fueled GOP will notice this discrepancy between their stated position against socialism, and the facts. Expect a filibuster anyway.

Image: Stalin

Source: David Leonhard at the New York Times

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Tags: command and control, energy bill, GOP, Senate, Senator Lugar, socialism

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

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Thanks for all the great information.
Brett

Susan,

I notice a lot of partisan commentary in your posts. What otherwise would be a nice, informative article is oft sprinkled with jabs at Republicans and similar conservatives. Common sense tells us which party supports clean energy more than the other- and we all know which one that is. But for any real solution to get passed it will require bi-partisan support. If you turn your articles, and this blog, into a Dem/Left website and anti-GOP- you remove any appearances of an unbiased approach.

I too am frustrated by some GOP antics, but I also realize not everyone shares our views. My comment is to please mitigate the Op-Ed page comments from your otherwise excellent articles. If we choose to bash Republicans here- what makes this website different than a Rush Limbaugh/Palin Op-Ed piece on Energy legislation that we all despise?
- http://cleantechnica.com/author/susan Susan Kraemer
  
  My response is that the entire mainstream media ignores the elephant in the room as it were. The result is that many people are ignorant of the reasons that we don’t and can’t pass legislation to move us to clean energy. They assume if they are Republicans and they support clean energy that their Republican Senator does too. It is that ignorance that I try to end. There’s plenty of environmental writers who won’t mention it, assuming that “Common sense tells us which party supports clean energy more than the other- and we all know which one that is.”
  
  No, people don’t know which one that is. They have other interests, busy lives, they just don’t realize why we are stuck. That ignorance is something we all pay for, with dirty energy policy. I agree that we need more than 60 votes to pass legislation. We need to elect 60 Senators who support clean energy and a future. Republican voters need to push their senators to start to support clean energy too, or elect Democrats if they want clean energy.
John B

BOTH parties have moved away from people and their ideology.

The misunderstanding is that the GOP has hardly any principles. They are sold to the highest bidder and their image is closer to selling out to the interest with the most capital to invest in bribing them. Since the supreme court undermined democracy last year there is more money involved than ever before.

I don’t think the DFL is much better; however, their image differs so much from where they are its much more difficult to get away fooling their base – playing weak, powerless, and over compromising can only fool people up to a point…