Waxman-Markey shows U.S. a failed state
June 26th, 2009 by Jim JustThe best analysis of Waxman-Markey I’ve seen is by a Brit – George Monbiot, writing in the U.K. Guardian:
The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations. Like the UK’s climate change act, the US bill calls for an 80% cut by 2050, but in this case the baseline is 2005, not 1990. Between 1990 and 2005, US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose from 5.8 to 7bn tonnes.
The cut proposed by 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill’s measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it’s printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.
There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There’s a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.
Like the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), Waxman-Markey would oblige companies to buy only a small proportion (15%) of their carbon permits. The rest will be given away. This means that a resource belonging to everyone (the right to pollute) is captured by industrial interests without public compensation. The more pollution companies have produced, the greater their free allocation will be – the polluter gets paid. It also means, if the ETS is anything to go by, that the big polluters will be able to make windfall profits by passing on the price of the permits they haven’t bought to their consumers.
In one respect the bill actually waters down current legislation, by preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating coal-burning power stations. If the new coal plants planned in the US are built, it’s hard to see how even the feeble targets in this bill can be met, let alone any targets proposed by the science.
Monbiot compares the U.S. to a failed state:
Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?
The U.S. may soon prove to be a failed state in fact, if California is a harbinger of things to come.
Monbiot blames a combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media for America’s inability to seriously address any one of the big issues we face, be it climate change, health care, or the class warfare the rich have been waging against everyone else.
Would that Obama had the courage to throw the moneychangers out of the temple. It was naïve to ever believe he would.
Charles Eisenstein writes at Reality Sandwich that the corruption permeates every institution of our society, even to our language. Our personal and political lives are immersed within an “ubiquitous matrix of lies.” The challenge is to stay honest by grounding ourselves again and again in the “reality outside representation”:
When environmentalists focus on cost-benefit analyses and study data rather than real, physical places, trees, ponds, and animals, they end up making all the sickening compromises of the Beltway. Liberal economists with the best of intentions cheer when a poor country raises its GDP; invisible to their statistics is the unraveling of culture and community that fuels the money economy. Visit a real “mountaintop removal” operation and you know that there is no compromise that is not betrayal. Visit a real third-world community and the vacuity of free-trade logic is obvious. See the devastation of a bullet wound or a bomb strike, lives strewn across the street, and the logic of national interest seems monstrous.
Eisenstein warns we can not for much longer hide the gathering collapse of environment and polity, economy and ecology – eventually, reality will break through. When stories fall apart, the world falls apart. As we rebuild from the wreckage that follows, the stories we tell with words unite masses of people toward a common goal, and assign the meanings and roles necessary to attain it.
And words will once again matter, and truth will mean the difference between life and death.