Maybe Next Year?
April 28th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
The Hill reports that some Congressional Democrats are thinking that cap and trade legislation might be best considered in 2010:
The House may not vote on a climate change bill this year, according to a high-ranking Democratic leader.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told The Hill on Monday that leaders could opt not to bring a climate measure to the floor if the bill has little chance of passing the Senate.
Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), had previously indicated they would pass a climate bill through the House by the August congressional recess.
The competing allegiances of Van Hollen — charged with leading Democrats into what is arguably their most challenging election cycle since 1994 and serving as a policy hand to Pelosi — were on display during his interview with The Hill.
Van Hollen, 50, became the highest-ranking House Democrat to say that even if an agreement is reached, the House may not vote on a cap-and-trade bill if the bill appears to have little hope of clearing the upper chamber.
“The first thing we need to do is see whether we can come together around a consensus position in the committees in the House, and that’s what we’re working on. And then, of course, if we were able to arrive at that, the question is whether you would take it to the floor, or do you wait to see if anything develops on the Senate side,” Van Hollen said.
“The chances of doing cap-and-trade in the Senate are much more difficult. We recognize that,” he added.
For a Democratic Caucus that has made the enactment of climate change legislation one of its highest priorities — Pelosi has called climate change the issue of her generation — the admission from a Democratic leader that the House may not vote on a long-awaited but controversial cap-and-trade bill this year is significant.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) suggests that the goal for legislation to pass has slipped as well:
Pelosi has also been stressing that the consensus-building work is well under way, and that negotiations should not be mistaken for the lack of an agreement.
“We couldn’t pass a bill, nor would it be appropriate to pass a bill … that was a penalty to some states,” Pelosi said last Wednesday at an event commemorating the 39th Earth Day.
“That’s why, as we go forward with this, it’s a consensus-building [process],” she continued. “As we always do in our caucus, we build consensus, hopefully in a bipartisan way, as we go forward with energy.”
At the same time, the Speaker laid down a marker that, at least rhetorically, was different from previous commitments to pass Waxman’s bill through the House this year.
“It is my commitment that by the time we observe the 40th Earth Day next year, that we’ll have made substantial progress toward energy independence, toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and reversing the climate crisis.”
I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that there will be little stomach among Democrats for a bruising debate over cap-and-trade 6 months before a mid-term election. Republicans, on the other hand, probably welcome the new schedule.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:23 am
But Nancy PROMISED a bill, remember? LOL.
Roger, you are out on a very stout limb, IMHO. I’ll go out even further and predict that ANY meaningful carbon tax is dead. By the time the economy improves enough to even seriously consider it, the general public will realize that the world is not sizzling, but in fact, may be going into another little ice age.
It is frightful just how close the environmental-extremists have come to ruining our economy, this time.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:40 am
“It is frightful just how close the environmental-extremists have come to ruining our economy, this time.” Really?
Accounting for the externalities of pollution makes sense. Pricing them may be difficult, but it is honest to goodness market failure in action. Funny how people love the market until it tells them they need to pay the actual price of their goods.
April 28th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Accounting for (scientific) untruths – CO2 pollution – makes sense…..NOT !
April 28th, 2009 at 8:56 am
byclark: Are you trying to SAY something with that arm-waving???
April 28th, 2009 at 9:33 am
It would be more correct to say “interfering with the recovery of the already ruined economy”. Given the choice though I’d rather money went towards alternative energy research than buying up more toxic debt from the rathole of crooks who got us into this mess in the first place.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I agree with byclark. Perhaps the boundary between the views of “environmental-extremists”, as jae would call them, and of reasonable people isn’t as clear cut as we would like. Someone insists on a carbon cost of $500 per ton is probably an extremist. But is it extremist to call for a $10 per ton tax? I don’t think so.
It is undeniable that today’s fossil fuel prices do not take into account the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere. It is also certain that no one knows what the costs truly are. I suppose they could even be negative, and the global warming will be a net benefit to humanity. This doesn’t strike me as very likely, but rather just seves to illustrate the uncertainty in what the cost of CO2 emissions are. Personally, I am strongly convinced that the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere is not zero.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
CurtFischer:
“It is undeniable that today’s fossil fuel prices do not take into account the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere. It is also certain that no one knows what the costs truly are. I suppose they could even be negative, and the global warming will be a net benefit to humanity. ”
Just WHAT are you saying? You seem to be contradicting yourself! We have absolutely no proof, right now, that there is a “positive” cost of emitting CO2, IMHO. We have only arm-waving and models (high-tech. arm-waving) which are virtually falsified by the data over the last 12 years. On the other hand, it is sure that the cost of adding plant food is negative.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
“It is undeniable that today’s fossil fuel prices do not take into account the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere. It is also certain that no one knows what the costs truly are. I suppose they could even be negative, and the global warming will be a net benefit to humanity. This doesn’t strike me as very likely…”
It strikes me as probable (more than a 50% chance of being true), at least for the marginal emissions of the next decade or more.
In order to answer the question, “What are the net costs of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere?”…it’s very important to try to perform some sort of assessment of what the optimal global temperature (and temperature distribution) is. If emitting CO2 goes towards the optimal temperature (and temperature distribution) then the costs could easily be negative (i.e., there could easily be a net benefit from CO2 emissions).
Curiously, there has been no attempt by the IPCC (to my knowledge) to address the question, “What is the optimum temperature (and temperature distribution) of the earth?”
“Personally, I am strongly convinced that the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere is not zero.”
The odds that the *net* cost (i.e., costs minus benefits) is exactly zero is indeed miniscule. But that’s simply due to the fact that the costs and the benefits are likely to be large numbers, so the odds that they exactly balance are vanishingly small.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Here’s some related stuff from Inhof. Deja Vu all over again?
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=ee92dac7-802a-23ad-46f1-77bb1dcf0613&Issue_id=
April 28th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Me: there is a number, call it x. We don’t know what x is.
jae: I assume x is zero and anything else is arm-waving and/or contradictory, preferably both. x = 0, and therefore no one who says otherwise is right. Some guys modeled stuff which suggested x wasn’t 0, but I didn’t think their model was good, so x is still 0.
—
@MarkBahner: Thank you for the response. I agree it would be awesome to have someone predict what the global optimum temperature is. I think predicting the global optimum in temperature distribution is easy, so easy that I’m willing to take a stab at it right now off the cuff: A world which was uniformly 16 C everywhere in the world (12 in the winter and 20 in the summer), seems pretty good to me. (The point being that the distribution of temperature is not really independent of the global mean temperature.)
April 29th, 2009 at 11:55 am
CurtFischer
That last statement was just annoying. The only thing that you have proven (I suspect unintentionally) is that global mean temperature is a completely meaningless construct that tells us nothing about climate.
“Personally, I am strongly convinced that the cost of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere is not zero.”
The cost to what? What is the quantity of cost? If we can’t tie rising CO2 to specific damage, how do you determine cost? So far, we have only predicted costs. If I had a dime for every time the weather man predicted rain and it didn’t…
It isn’t x that equals 0, it’s your argument.