By Teddy Davis, ABC News
One of Barack Obama’s closest allies in the Senate said Tuesday that she hopes the economic downturn can induce the incoming president to delay the centerpiece of his plan for reducing carbon emissions. “Let me speak for me here because I think this is very dangerous,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. “I would like to keep my relationship with Barack at this point. Let me speak for me.”
McCaskill said she hoped Obama would delay a plan to institute a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. “I think a delay may be necessary,” she continued. “Yes, we’ve got to do something. Yes, we have to move forward. But we can’t kill the business climate at the same time. I’m from a state where most of the people who turn on the lights in the state get it from utility companies that depend on coal. And the cost of switching all that to clean coal technology or to alternative sources is going to be borne by them—by regular folks who are trying to figure out how to pay their mortgages right now.”
McCaskill cemented her ties to Obama during the Democratic presidential primary campaign by becoming the first female senator to endorse him over Hillary Clinton. She made her cap-and-trade comments to Ron Brownstein, the political director of Atlantic Media, during a National Journal discussion of Obama’s “First 100 Days” held in Washington, D.C.
Under the Obama plan, the federal government would set a ceiling on carbon emissions and require companies to bid for permits to emit greenhouse gases through an auction. The government would gradually lower the amount of credits available. Firms that reduced their emissions below the required level could sell leftover credits to other polluters. Obama would take a small portion of the auction receipts, $15 billion per year, and use it on energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and what his campaign promise book, “Change We Can Believe In,” refers to as “other measures to help the economy adjust.”
Raising concerns about cap-and-trade is nothing new for McCaskill. In June she was one of 10 Democratic senators to sign a letter criticizing a cap-and-trade proposal sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee. The letter said that a federal cap-and-trade program must ensure that consumers and workers in all regions of the country are protected from “undue hardship.” Opponents of the Boxer plan worried that it would raise the cost for electricity generated from fossil fuels.
“I’m one of the senators that signed a letter on cap-and-trade,” McCaskill said Tuesday. “We’ve got to find a more moderate middle here because you’re playing with fire.” Read more here.
Investor’s Business Daily
Barack Obama meets with Al Gore to discuss global warming, green jobs and his energy team. Did they also discuss how their policies will put America’s ailing economy in a deep freeze? In advance of the naming of an energy secretary, an EPA administrator and a new climate czar, the president-elect consulted Tuesday in Chicago with the oracle of climate change. “How policies in this area can stimulate the economy and create jobs” was the topic, according to a transition team spokesperson.
Which reminded us that seven months ago, Obama promised that “Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem.” That’s what we’re afraid of. In a video presentation to a U.N. conference held to revive the Kyoto Treaty approach, Obama concurred with Gore that warming science is “beyond dispute and the facts are clear.” “Sea levels are rising,” he asserted, “coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen drought spreading famine, and storms are growing stronger with each passing season.” Problem is, none of it’s true.
The Gore-Obama meeting followed an announcement by researchers at Florida State University that the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years. Then there was a report in November on cyclone activity showing storm durations and wind speeds in 2007 and 2008 were among the lowest since reliable global satellite data became available three decades ago.
As for those coastlines, studies by the International Commission on Sea Level Changes and others show ocean levels in recent decades have actually fallen. The Indian Ocean, for example, was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since.
Due to a decline in solar activity and other factors, the Earth is cooling, and has been since 1998. A peer-reviewed study published in April by Nature predicted the world will continue cooling at least through 2015. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.
Meteorologist and Weather Channel founder John Coleman notes that a significant natural warming trend peaked in 1998 with lots of sunspots and solar flares. Now the sun has gone quiet with fewer sunspots, and global temperatures have gone into decline. “Earth,” he says, “has cooled for almost 10 straight years.”
So why in an economy reeling from a market collapse are we still considering emission controls certain to kill both jobs and economic growth? The EPA said the cap-and-trade lunacy of the recently stalled Lieberman-Warner bill would have caused a loss of $3 trillion in GDP in a $14 trillion economy. An analysis by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation concluded that passage of Lieberman-Warner would by 2030 cost the average American household $6,752 a year, with job losses as much as four million. The Earth is cooling. So is the economy. It’s time to step on the gas, not regulate it. See post here.
By EurActiv
Despite “significant steps” taken to soften the impact of the EU’s climate change goals on its industry, Italy yesterday (8 December) continued to maintain a tough negotiating line ahead of a decisive EU summit on 11-12 December. During separate meetings of foreign affairs and energy ministers in Brussels, the Italian government firmly restated its intention to obtain exemptions from the package for its energy-intensive industrial sectors such as paper, glass, steel and brick industries.
“It is one of our red lines,” stressed Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, formerly vice-president of the European Commission. Under the draft package to be discussed by EU heads of state and government this week, energy-intensive industries will be asked, as of 2013, to gradually pay for the right to emit CO2. But Italy, Germany and other Eastern European countries claim the rules, if applied too strictly, will force energy-intensive sectors to close down factories and move abroad, leading to job losses and rising CO2 emissions outside Europe -’carbon leakage’.
Most EU countries seem ready to make concessions to those industries and the diplomatic battle is now focusing on how to measure the actual risk for individual sectors which claim to be more exposed than others to international competition. Diplomats will gather in Brussels on 10 December to attempt striking a deal ahead of meeting of EU leaders at the end of the week, where decisions on the package will have to be taken by unanimity.
As one of its “red lines”, Rome is pushing for the inclusion of a general revision clause for the entire package after a UN conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will aim to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Italy wants to link the implementation of the EU climate package to the outcome of the Copenhagen talks, namely in the form of a commitment from the US and China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. China and the US currently have no binding commitment to reduce their emissions and getting them onboard is one of the EU’s main objectives in the negotiation.
EU energy minister made more concessions to Italy by introducing a mid-term review clause (in 2014) to a proposal aimed at boosting the share of renewable energies to 20% of the EU’s energy mix by 2020 (see Links Dossier). “The compromise makes clear that the mid-term targets will be only indicative and not binding as we requested,” the Italian minister for economic development Claudio Scajola told journalists after the Energy Council on Monday (8 December). However, the revision clause will not put into question the 20% target by 2020, stressed Jean-Louis Borloo, French Energy minister, who was chairing the meeting. The European Parliament will now be asked to give its green light to the deal in a vote scheduled on 17 December.
Benny Peiser Note: I expect that the EU summit at the weekend will come up with a very similar fudge - as usual. I also expect that the green media and climate activists are likely to hail it as a ‘historic’ breakthrough - as usual. But let’s not beat around the bush: whatever the EU summit may or may not decide at the weekend, you can be absolutely sure that it will not be legally binding targets. This original plan has now been abandoned - full stop. Without binding targets, however, the EU will signal unambiguously that it is waiting for the rest of the world to move - before it will make ‘any’ binding commitments. And that, we know, could take for ever.