Black is the New Green, Part 1: Lieberman, Big-box Environmentalism, and the Great Climate Sellout

The political tactics around climate change have shifted. Despite a vicious and well-funded rearguard action, there is a general realization that denial is no longer an effective tactic for avoiding the issue. The game now becomes one of minimizing impact, and maximizing profit. The new responses that from the deniers and delayers, nationally and locally, tend to fall into one of four categories:

• Look good while doing nothing of substance (examples are electric utility and most – but not all - other voluntary offset and green power schemes),
• Go about business as usual, adding disingenuous reassuring incantations about healing the earth, maybe later, if we feel like it (we are currently fighting a round of new coal plant proposals across the country that are aggressively pushing this line),
• Cherry-pick the proposals on the table to concoct a poison pill emissions regulation package that makes rational discussion of the best policy answer impossible. Get prominent organizations that actually want to do the right thing to engage you seriously, thereby associating them with a deeply unpopular and flawed proposal. The resulting controversy and confusion kicks the can down the road for another decade or so (Dingell's schizophrenic initiative on climate is an excellent instance of this play).
• Make sure that regulation, when it comes, vastly enriches the usual suspects, while accomplishing little to nothing that substantially changes the medium term carbon emissions vector (a cap-and-trade artificial carbon market with a giveaway is the most egregious example, and is probably what we will end up getting). At worst, this can be combined with the above tactics to actually be counter-productive (the heavily subsidized Archer-Daniels Midland approach to biofuels is a great example of this).

This last play is what Lieberman-Warner is all about. As with the poison-pill strategy, success hinges on co-opting trusted environmental groups and foundations to lend their reputation for integrity in service of your lame initiative. Unfortunately, in the case of Lieberman-Warner, that part has been ridiculously easy. A litany of big-box environmental groups, from Natural Resources Defense Council to National Wildlife Federation, is enthusiastically flogging this legislation around Congress.

This is very, very bad. Why, you ask?

Well, back about three years ago, before it became abundantly apparent how much trouble we are really in, the mainstream consensus among climate scientists was that in order to stabilize atmospheric carbon levels at twice baseline levels (an arbitrary target, but one expected at the time to hold long-term impacts to a serious but not catastrophic level), we would need to reduce current US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (something that Clinton already promised and failed to do by 1999), and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The dire news coming out of recent climate research indicates that we will have to do better then that. But let's keep that as a baseline for now.

Using that metric, minimally acceptable legislation:

• must result in emission reductions that get us in or below the band of a path that stabilizes carbon concentrations at or below 450-550 parts per million, or twice pre-industrial levels (the overlay graphic above is from a typically optimistic legislative analysis done by the World Resources Institute),
• must front-load the institutional mechanisms that get us there instead of making a meaningless promise to hit an imaginary goal half a century from now (in politics, a decade is a very long time, and fifty years is eternity),
• must be comprehensive,
• must not transfer vast sums of wealth to polluters, and
• must not be so leaky that the goals are a shuck.

It would be nice if the legislation temporarily attenuated the direct hit on small energy consumers until our current round of guzzling cars and appliances die, while assuring that the next car and appliance does the right thing. Given that the price of carbon will ramp in slowly as targets start to tighten, there is no particular reason why industrial polluters should get any kind of pass, let alone a windfall.

This is the non-negotiable threshold position. There are lots of good arguments for doing more than this. Anything *less* than this is not just a waste of time, it is a betrayal of our future. Less simply doesn't get the job done. That is not ideological purity talking. It's arithmetic.

Lieberman-Warner is a warmed-over version of Lieberman-McCain, and fails the above criteria on all counts. It is the least effective serious proposal on the table. Even taking the "mandated" 70% reduction by 2050 seriously, overall reductions end up way above the band of what it takes to reach climate stabilization at 450-550 ppm. It simply does not do what needs to be done.

But the reality of the bill is much worse. It isn't comprehensive - it only applies to 75% of current US greenhouse gas sources, ever. It doesn't even start until 2012 (so much for being in a hurry to get it done in 2008). It gives away huge (though declining) indulgences to big industrial and electric generation polluters (effectively exempting them as well) until 2036, and a grab bag of other indulgences forever, seriously weakening the synthetic carbon market that is supposed to solve the emissions problem by internalizing carbon costs. You can see the effect in a recent (optimistic) analysis of Lieberman-Warner from Duke University, with carbon costs not hitting $50/ton (a good rule-of-thumb marker for what you are spending if you are serious) for another 30 years. It is full of goodies for special interests, particularly the coal industry, and has a laughably naive fixation on carbon sequestration, casting it as a gigantic Hail Mary play that magically makes everything work out in the end. Finally, only a tiny fraction of the huge embedded subsidies go to actually help consumers - the rest go to allowing the usual suspects to continue business as usual.

But the most damning indictment of Lieberman-Warner is that the already inadequate 70% reduction number that proponents like to throw around is a fraud. Unlike most of the other proposals on the table, the 70% reduction marker in Lieberman-Warner is indexed to 2005 emission levels, not 1990 levels. And, it doesn't even come close to meeting that disingenuous expectation. The legislation would, in fact, only directly reduce US climate emissions 20% by 2050. That's barely enough to get us back to 1990 levels by 2050. The rest of the assumed savings - the vast bulk of the alleged reductions - in Lieberman-Warner hinge on massive, indirect carbon offsets (extremely dicey to reliably quantify, and really just outsourcing the damage even if you get what you think you getting), and on theoretical free-driver (as opposed to free-rider) emission reductions in the 25% of current US carbon sources that the legislation does not address at all.

Bottom line: Contrary to the hype, Lieberman-Warner would only reduce US carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2050. If this grotesque legislation becomes the official US response to climate change, we lose.

We haven't even gotten to the question of why we are bothering with federal climate legislation at all while Bush is president, or what happens when Lieberman-Warner is the position we are negotiating down from. On its face, why would any responsible public policy advocate actively support this proposal?

So why have most of the big-box environmental groups signed up for this turkey? We'll talk about that in part 2.