The climate bill is a sweetheart deal for Big Coal and agribusiness

(Image from api.ning.com)

The energy and climate change legislation may have just barely survived the House, but it’s now stuffed with handouts to the very industries that play a large role in polluting the environment — Big Coal and Big Agribusiness. Or, to put it another way, the New York Times calls the shameless cluster of concessions, bribes, and hand-outs “something for everyone.” Oh.

The deal contains $174 billion in subsidies to the coal industry, a concession Dennis Kucinich calls a boon to polluters. 

The bill allows two billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to 30 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions. Supporters of the bill point out that coal use will increase by 2020, because electric utilities will continue to use dirty coal, the prime source of pollution. With two billion tons of offsets per year, we’re told electric utilities will reduce carbon emissions at places other than their generating plants. So they really don’t have to actually decrease their emissions, and coal-fired CO2 emissions will increase through 2025. No wonder there are twenty-six active coal plant applications. Increased CO2 emissions will be our gift to the next generation. Apparently, the planet is not melting; with this bill, it’s just getting better for polluters.

Those environmentalists that tried to raise objections to the legislation were mocked, marginalized, and in some cases, bullied by the White House. Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that the White House was “smoking mad” at Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who made it clear he intended to vote against the climate bill. ”[It's] stunning that he would ignore the wishes not just of his president, but of his constituents and the country,” said an administration official.

Yes, it’s stunning that a representative would go against the wishes of the president and vote in the interests of the planet (which sort of inherently includes his constituents and country.) How dare he! Thrush updated his entry to say that Doggett’s objection to the bill was “wavering.” I’ll bet.

Before he lost his nerve, Doggett said, “This energy bill’s fine print betrays its laudable purpose. The real cap is on the public interest and the trade is the billions from the public to polluters.”

Including the coal industry in America’s environmental movement is sort of like inviting the private healthcare and insurance industries to the table to discuss a public option for healthcare. Why would the coal industry want to play a role in its own antiquation? The simple answer is it doesn’t want to. That’s why the coal industry invented the myth of “clean coal,” and now runs abstract commercials about central Florida (featuring random, frightened alligators) to convince Americans that coal production is not destroying the planet:

They’re lying. Coal cannot be clean and it’s damaging our environment. One need only look at Tennessee’s Kingston Fossil Plant disaster  where 5.4 cubic yards of coal-fly ash broke past a retention wall and buried the surrounding area to understand why there cannot be a “Big Coal” solution to an environmental problem.

Coal-fired plants contribute 59% of the US’s total sulfur dioxide and 18% of total nitrogen oxides pollution every year. The Sierra Club reports that coal-fired power plants are also “the largest polluter of toxic mercury pollution, the largest contributor of hazardous air toxics, and release about 50% of particle pollution.  Additionally, power plants release over 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, a prime contributor to global warming.”

Now, the US government has subsidized their pollution and calls it climate change legislation. Well, it’s true that it will change the climate, but not for the better. Even such concessions as cutting emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050 can easily be avoided through flawed methods of monitoring compliance, according to environmentalists.

In addition to the meddling from Big Coal, many farm groups are already ready to fight the legislation coming out of Congress. In an interview with the New York Times, Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan said, ”Agriculture can in effect hold this bill hostage…This suggests we’re only at the beginning of the negotiating process.”

And these aren’t mom and pop-owned farms. The farms that have the most lobbyists, receive the most subsidies, and emit the most pollutants are Big Agribusiness i.e. factory farms. These are the farms that have the least amount of public support, and yet collectively receive $5.2 billion a year in government subsidies.

In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carner describes the climate bill as a “porkfest for well-connected corporations.” (emphasis mine)

Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, two of the environmentalists’ corporate enemies, now stand to profit handsomely from the Waxman-Markey bill’s cap-and-trade scheme aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the hope of slowing the shift in climate.

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, held a hearing earlier this month on the “American Clean Energy and Security Act,” sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Ed Markey, D-Mass. Committee members asked, on behalf of farmers, agri-business, and the agri-chemical industry, “what’s in this for us?”

Peterson, according to the environmentalist website Grist, demanded concessions from Waxman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., or else he would lead a bloc of three dozen farm-state lawmakers to kill the bill in the House. At the expense of whatever credibility remained in Waxman-Markey’s claim to affect the climate, Pelosi and Waxman gave the agri-lobby two significant gifts.

The gifts include concessions to the ethanol industry and the promise of “carbon offsets.” For many years, the ethanol industry has enjoyed mandates and subsidies, but the government funding has shifted its purpose from food production to fuel production. As a result, food production has moved overseas, and now The Environmental Protection Agency accuses the ethanol industry of contributing to deforestation by paying foreign farmers to clear rainforest so they can plant the food crops Iowa farmers used to grow. The EPA informed the ethanol industry that it is considering counting deforestation as an indirect cost of ethanol, which would reduce ethanol’s access to future “green fuel favors” from Washington.

Ethanol tried to get this EPA ruling killed by attaching a rider to the climate bill. As if this concession wasn’t bad enough, the government has also made it easier to earn “offsets,”

which could then be sold to emitters of greenhouse gases, such as factories. Now, instead of the EPA determining what activities warrant offsets, and how much, the bill gives that authority to the Agriculture Department, where farmers and agri-business have much more clout.

Environmentalists fear the “offsets” solution will lead to more pollution and corruption, since the government has yet to explain how it intends to aggressively regulate or monitor pollution emitted by industries.

They emphasize that it’s not enough to simply regulate emissions, but the government needs to reduce emissions from the big polluters such as coal plants and factory farms. This newest climate bill seems to have lost that focus, and instead has become — as the Times suggests — a terrible amalgam of hand-outs and bribes.