Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold the first of three hearings on S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” also known as Kerry-Boxer, after its co-sponsors Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Kerry-Boxer is the Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as Waxman-Markey, after its co-sponsors Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA).
For those worried about the economic impacts of these bills, I bring unwelcome news: their bite is worse than their bark. Escalator clauses common to both bills, ignored in most previous analyses, are the setup for dramatic increases in regulatory stringency well beyond the bills’ explicit emission reduction targets. Similarly, “findings” presenting the “scientific” rationale for cap-and-trade are not mere rhetorical fluff but precedents for litigation targeting emission sources considerably smaller than those explicitly identified as “covered entities.”…
Many analysts (including myself) have written about the innumerable problems with cap-and-trade, mostly focusing on the bogus nature of the trade. And most of the problems we’ve predicted have found their way into the current cap-and-trade law working its way through Congress, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Waxman-Markey climate bill).
As was widely predicted, Waxman-Markey has degenerated into little more than a special-interest pork-fest, where the political system is getting ready to give away at least 85% of the valuable emission permits to favored energy constituencies such as electrical utilities, university researchers, low-income households, renewable manufacturers, anti-deforestation programs, and so on. The Obama administration’s pledge to auction off 100% of the emission permits was a joke on the face of it: virtually all emission trading programs feature extensive “grandfathering” of polluters and favored constituencies.…