Climate Bill's Dress Rehearsal

The climate change legislation on the floor of the Senate this week would be the most important piece of energy legislation ever – if it had a chance of becoming law. Instead the debate is, as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) put it, a “dress rehearsal.”

If it had a chance of passing, it would steer tens of billions of dollars of energy investment toward efficiency projects, renewable resources such as solar and wind, and nuclear power. More money could also end up in demonstration plants designed to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The legislation would do all this in a roundabout, but theoretically politically palatable way: it would establish caps on emissions with a set of rules for companies to trade permits and offset credits needed to meet those caps. While commonly known as cap-and-trade, which sounds pithy and free-market oriented, a more accurate but less sexy-sounding name would be a system of tradable rationing coupons. In plain English, that would mean putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, which would raise costs for anyone burning fossil fuels, whether in a gasoline tank, a coal-fired power plant, or a natural gas stove. (Columnist Robert J. Samuelson gives his views of the whole mess.)

But if all this is a dress rehearsal, why care?

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Posted by Steven Mufson on June 3, 2008 1:46 PM