EDITORIAL: It's time to put a price on carbon
The images of oil-covered birds and beaches, and the ubiquitous spill cam, make BP's pollution of the Gulf of Mexico highly visible and shocking. Meanwhile, another form of pollution - far larger in scale but nearly invisible - has been going on as usual. Congress must address both. This is the pivotal time.
If you convert the daily Gulf spill into tons, estimates Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation, it's 2,000 tons a day. That's a staggering number. But not if you compare it, as Symons does, with the 6 million tons of carbon dioxide that we in the United States spew into the atmosphere every day just from burning oil - 15 million, if you count all sources.
Though there's room for debate on the timing and the details, the overwhelming consensus among scientists globally is that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. That has implications beyond devastating effects on the environment and people. If we don't act, the cost of environmental damage could reduce gross domestic product around the world.
The oil spill provides a jolt to the senses, a reminder of the perils of drilling for ever-harder-to-find oil, and an incentive to do something - if we pay attention. There are hopeful signs, and ominous ones.
In a speech this past Wednesday in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama talked about a climate bill passed by the House and a plan in the Senate. "I want you to know, the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months," he said. "I will work with anyone to get this done - and we will get it done."
The Senate remains a question, but in the next two weeks, we'll begin to get an idea if the senators are serious about addressing this issue now.
First, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will meet with chairmen of Senate committees, and in mid-month, the entire Democratic conference is to discuss the issue.
In between the two, the Senate is likely to vote on an effort by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency's formal finding last year that greenhouse gases are a threat to the health and well-being of humans. She is not likely to succeed, but if she gets a lot of votes for her ill-considered idea, that's a bad sign.
Murkowski, considered certain to want a long list of benefits to the oil and gas industries in exchange for her vote on any climate bill, is a vivid example of the problem: Passing legislation as big as the climate bill usually means packing it with provisions designed to buy votes in many states.
This is not the place to parse huge bills in detail, but whatever comes out of the legislative sausage factory must have some basic features:
Put a price on carbon. We all share a vital resource: The ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases. Instead of using it for free, as we now do, we must price carbon, so we all pay our fair share.
Oil and coal companies internalize profits and externalize costs, such as the damage to our shared environment. That has to change. We have to stuff those external costs back into the prices we pay for energy. The increased prices will send a market signal to consumers and producers: Use less fossil fuel, and invest in alternative sources of energy.
Mitigate the pain. Any bill should cushion the pain of higher energy prices, at least for the lowest-income Americans. The CLEAR Act, sponsored in the Senate by Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), would make companies buy permits, essentially for the right to sell carbon-laden fuels. It would then give back 75 percent of the proceeds from the sales of the permits to all of us.
This benefit would be the same for every person in the country. For those who use less carbon, the money deposited in their bank accounts would be more than they're paying in higher costs. But one criticism is that it doesn't do enough to deal with the problem that some regions will get hit harder by price increases than others.
Other bills protect consumers by giving utilities free emissions allowances at the outset and counting on state regulators to make sure they pass those savings on to customers.
Don't offset us. Some of the bills - the CLEAR Act is an exception - rely too much on "offsets." This means emitters can satisfy part of their obligation to reduce emissions by paying for something that reduces carbon elsewhere - like planting trees in Brazil. But offsets are really tough to monitor and measure well.
Avoid price fluctuation. All the bills put a ceiling and floor on the prices for allowances and permits. If the prices are too volatile, as they've been known to be in cap-and-trade systems, investors won't have the certainty they need to spend money toward developing alternate fuels.
Now the Senate must take the best features from the different approaches and craft a bill it can pass - and one that will really work. If the BP crisis doesn't give senators a sense of urgency, you have to wonder what in the world it would take. hN
