Waxman-Markey: Carbon Offsets
On Tuesday, March 31, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) released a “discussion draft” of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 – a climate change bill that will serve as the starting point for long-delayed congressional action on the world’s most pressing environmental program. CPRBlog asked several Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholars to examine different aspects of the 648-page Waxman-Markey bill. This entry, by Victor Flatt, looks at the offsets for carbon emissions that would be permitted under the measure.
The Waxman-Markey draft bill treads some familiar ground with respect to the use of offsets to meet greenhouse gas reduction requirements, but also introduces some new innovations. In departing from other drafts and bills, the offsets provision may be most controversial in its limited examination of the environmental effects of offsets, and its use of offset management to try and address international competitiveness issues.
Like most other bills, and consistent with recommendations from economists, the Waxman-Markey bill assumes the use of offsets to provide greenhouse gas reductions in lieu of surrendering emission allocations. Interestingly, the bill provides that offset reductions of a ton of CO2 equivalent are not …
CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus, joined by Member Scholars Rob Glicksman (also a CPR Board Member), Alex Camacho, and Dan Rohlf, along with myself, today sent the Secretaries of the Departments of Commerce and Interior a letter urging them to utilize the time-limited authority that Congress gave them to withdraw one of the more controversial midnight regulations issued by the Bush Administration. Those regulations undercut one of the Endangered Species Act’s (ESA) most important protections—a requirement that federal agencies consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and/or the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to be sure that actions they plan to take (for example, funding a new highway) are not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of threatened and endangered species.
The Bush consultation regulations represent the worst kind of midnight rulemaking—they are poorly considered, unjustified by any evidence, and were patently …
The Supreme Court today upheld a decision from the Bush administration's EPA that was good for industry and bad for the environmental health of our rivers and estuaries (my brief press statement on the case, Entergy v. EPA, is here; the court's decision is here). But the majority opinion by Justice Scalia was written narrowly in a way that gives the Obama administration the leeway to approach these kinds of decisions in a more productive way. I'm hopeful they will seize that opportunity and avoid using cost-benefit analysis to set environmental standards in this case and beyond. The profound environmental challenges we face in the 21st century demand a different approach. If the EPA confronts the climate crisis with methodology that requires putting a dollar figure on every bird, bee and ecosystem that faces devastation from a warming globe, they’ll be paralyzed. This …
