Seven Ways Cantwell-Collins Gets it Right

Dec 15, 2009

Read FCNL's full endorsement of the CLEAR Act here.

On Friday December 11, 2009 Senators Maria Cantwell (WA) and Susan Collins (ME) introduced a long-awaited alternative climate bill into the Senate. Until then, the climate debate in the 111th Congress was dominated by the cap and trade bills pushed by a few powerful members of Congress with the support of a coalition of business and a few environmental groups called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.

The political trade-offs that were brokered in the House-passed cap and trade climate bill undermined the original intent of the policy to such an extent that FCNL did not support final passage. Giving away free money to polluting industry, subsidizing coal, and including billions of tons of dubious "offsets" were a few of the reasons FCNL believed H.R. 2454 was in fact a step in the wrong direction.

The bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Cantwell and Collins, Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal Act (CLEAR), S. 2877, is written to address many of the problems that FCNL and others have been working overtime to fix.

Here are seven ways that the Cantwell-Collins climate bill gets it right:

1. 100 percent auction of pollution permits
There are no free giveaways to industry; every emitter of a ton of fossil fuel carbon dioxide pays an equal price.

2. Refund of pollution revenue
Although putting a price on carbon will increase prices in the short-term, 80 percent of the public will feel no net financial impact because 75 percent of the pollution revenue collected by the government is returned to every resident of the United States.

3. Protection from market manipulation
To address concerns of Wall Street traders driving up or down the price of carbon purely to make profit and potentially jeopardizing the entire pollution-reduction system, CLEAR limits who can participate in the carbon market to those who must turn in carbon permits.

4. No offsets
CLEAR contains no offsets. Carbon offsets are used in other climate legislation to substitute for industry pollution reductions, but the Government Accountability Office concludes that offsets are impossible to verify as real emission reductions.

5. Does not pick technology winners and losers
CLEAR does not subsidize nuclear power, coal, or renewable energy. Instead it puts 25 percent of the carbon revenue into the normal congressional appropriations process to be allocated separately every year.

6. "Upstream cap"
CLEAR requires compliance as high up in the economy as possible – at the wellhead, coal mine, or import point. This reduces the administrative burden to only 2 to 3 thousand producers and importers and ensures catching the vast majority of fossil carbon that enters the U.S. economy.

7. Keeps Clean Air Act protections
The ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to set minimum standards for greenhouse gas-emitters is left intact.

Read FCNL's full endorsement of the CLEAR Act here.