14 Things I Love--and 6 I Hate--About Waxman-Markey
My grade?
Overall, I give Representatives Henry Waxman of California (pictured) and Edward Markey of Massachusetts a solid “B,” but I’m grading on a curve--the curve of political reality. Straight A’s are hard to come by with oil, coal, and other industries spending almost $80 million lobbying on climate policy in just the past three months (pdf). Under withering fire, Waxman-Markey’s cap-and-trade superstructure is still intact. If it passes in its current form, we can all be pleased, but we’ll have to hold our breath, hoping that the offset provisions work as intended. If we can induce the House or Senate to fix a few flaws before passing it, we can be euphoric. Waxman-Markey could be the most important piece of energy or environmental legislation in a generation. It’s also much-needed economic policy: clean energy can be the path out of recession.
How do I love it? I’ll enumerate as soon as I document its flaws. First, though, a warning: to keep this post shorter than 948 pages, I used some wonk-speak. (An English-language exposition will be available soon, in our Cap and Trade 101 federal primer.)
6 things I hate about Waxman-Markey:
Yglesias on Paying for Climate Change
More like this, please:
We can pay some up-front costs now, or else we can pay the price of catastrophic climate change and then start paying even higher mitigation costs. Friedman analogized what we’re doing to the behavior that led to the financial crisis, and though this can be pushed to far, I think there’s something to it. What we’re doing, basically, is choosing not to account for the real cost of burning fossil fuel. As long as the party lasts, that looks like a great option. But what you’re really doing is building up a bigger and bigger problem that will eventually come crashing down.
Waxman-Markey on Manufactured Homes
- Cap and Trade
- Efficiency
- Energy
- Green Business
- Sustainable Living
- Cascadia
- Oregon
- United States
- US Northwest
- Washington
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