Demand for Tariffs in Global-Warming Legislation Splits Allies

By: Jim Tankersley
Date: August 22, 2009
Source: Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com)

Ednote: The discussion over carbon trading started a few years ago and as real legislation is promulgated true argument is in place and heating up. Waxman-Markey climate-change bill has been passed. You our readers need to learn what the impact of this legislation means to you and how it will affect your quality of life. An early lawmaker quipped- a public gets the government they deserve. Taking that a little deeper- educated voters make better decisions.

Some enviros say carbon credits allow polluters continue to pollute. To a degree maybe they’re correct. But let’s look at a larger picture.

An example: Ejidos – cooperative farms – in Latin America grow let’s say bamboo. Bamboo is one of the most renewable resources on Earth. It generates 8 times the Oxygen of any other plant and sequesters more carbon in 1 year than a tree does in 8 years. Ejidos, or any bamboo plantations that harvest and sell bamboo can document the tonnage of carbon sequestered and qualify for carbon credits. These credits create wealth for the growers, which in turn enable them to become consumers (maybe not so good,) educate their children (helping to offset population growth) and produce more bamboo (more oxygen). People- planet – profits – the proverbial “triple bottom-line.”

Meanwhile – back in the states. Coal fired energy producers continue to belch fire and smoke and particulates and toxics into the atmosphere for all the little children down-wind to become potential asthmatics. But those coal plants are buying carbon credits to offset their purchases of expensive Ionic and wet smokestack scrubbers, while still causing harm to the population in closest proximity.

The U.S. is not currently a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. The major argument being that developing economies aren’t restricting their carbon emissions and the playing fields are not equal (level).

Paul Krugman’s article is cause to “read and weep!”

A group of Midwestern Democrats is pushing for tariffs on products from countries that don't limit greenhouse gas emissions, a controversial step that the legislators say is needed to help American manufacturers survive expected emissions restrictions here.

The Democrats say the measure would level the playing field for U.S. factories, which will probably face increased energy costs due to global warming legislation backed by the Obama administration. The legislation narrowly passed in the House in June and is pending in the Senate.

The tariff demand has placed a group of often-reliable allies for President Obama -- including Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and the newly installed Al Franken of Minnesota -- squarely at odds with the president, who has said that he doesn't want to send "protectionist" signals with the climate change bill.

But Brown said shortly before convening a climate summit earlier this month in Perrysburg that the tariff provision "has to be in" to win the votes of factory-state senators.

It's "about jobs, and it's an opportunity to fix some of our problems in manufacturing, and one of those is the way we've conducted trade in this country," Brown said.

The centerpiece of the climate bill is a system, known as cap-and-trade, which sets gradually declining caps on emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Major industries, such as power plants and factories, would need permits for their emissions, which they could buy and sell on an open market.

That basic concept is supported by the bulk of congressional Democrats, along with some Republicans.

The conflict comes in the fine print -- particularly in efforts to protect state and regional economies from the effects of higher energy prices due to the cost of reducing emissions.

As the tariff debate illustrates, one senator's idea of protection can often be another's idea of harm.

A potential tax on imports from countries that do not adopt emissions restrictions would help U.S. factories that have shed jobs in recent decades in the face of low-wage competition, Brown and fellow factory-state A Midwestern Democrats, who want duties placed on countries who don't limit greenhouse gas emissions, are at odds with Obama. Democrats say.

The move would protect existing factory jobs, the senators say, and stop companies from outsourcing production to nations without emissions limits, such as China and India.

Brown added that a climate change bill with a tariff provision offers the best opportunity in decades to reinvigorate Ohio's slumping manufacturing sector and overhaul U.S. trade policies.

Unions and environmental groups in the Midwest have supported the idea and launched a media blitz Wednesday across the industrial Midwest to tout the economic potential of the climate bill.

If done right -- with strong trade protections -- the bill would be "the most important piece of job-creating legislation in 20 years," said David Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, one of the groups sponsoring the Midwest media campaign.

Factory-state senators say the tariff could help them level the scales with foreign competitors as the states try to shift their industries toward high-tech products, such as wind turbines, solar panels and other alternative energy sources, said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

"These clean-technology jobs I don't believe are just some future goal or something in the distance. We're creating them now," he said.

But a tariff upsets some Senate Republicans who have supported past global warming legislation.

"It's absurd for Democrats to think they're going to slap a trade tariff on China, when China is buying all our Treasury debt to keep our economy alive right now," said Mark Helmke, a senior advisor to Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar.

Opponents of the tariff say U.S. manufacturing would suffer under the climate bill regardless of trade policy changes.

A recent study by the American Council for Capital Formation and the National Assn. of Manufacturers, which both oppose the bill, warns that the nation could lose as many as 750,000 factory jobs by 2030 if the bill passes.

If climate tariffs are imposed, U.S. trading partners would probably respond in kind, offsetting any benefits that manufacturing would achieve from them, said Margo Thorning, chief economist for ACCF.

Some Democrats worry that tariffs could undermine efforts to win Chinese and Indian support for an international climate treaty set to be negotiated in Copenhagen in December.

"I don't think it is really possible to threaten and intimidate these two countries to a long-term commitment to reduce emissions," said Ed Gresser, trade analyst for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which favors free trade.

Obama said in a June interview that he opposed a tariff provision included in the House climate bill that is similar to the provision that Brown is promoting in the Senate.

The House approved the bill by a vote of 219 to 212, cast largely along party lines, with 44 Democrats defecting but eight Republicans helping it narrowly pass.

Betraying the Planet

By: Paul Krugman
Date: June 29, 2009
Source: The New York Times (www.nytimes.com)

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.