Daily Score Blog

As I have been researching energy efficiency something has bothered me about energy and poverty data. I wanted to see actual income numbers next to energy use, kind of the way we would look at prevalence rates in public health. That would help me wrap my head around the connections between climate policy and fairness. I want to be able to say something like “people who earn less than $15,000 a year pay x percent of their income in energy costs while those who earn more than $50,000 pay much less than x percent.”

I did find a chart on the Department of Energy website that indicated that the average family pays 5 percent of its income in energy costs while low income families pay 16 percent. Pretty good information; but I wanted more. The chart was based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) from 2001. So I looked behind the chart and found data from the most recent survey in 2005.

Here is a snapshot.

*** This is a preliminary summary of a huge bill, so it's not Sightline's final answer. Look for a more thorough and polished analysis next week. ***

Weighing in at 821 pages, the Kerry-Boxer climate bill introduced into the US Senate yesterday is officially a whopper, though it's certainly more svelte than the companion House bill that it substantially mirrors. (Apparently, it's Kerry-Boxer, not Boxer-Kerry, despite what you may have heard.)

Update, 1:20: quick aside on the price ceiling: Lots of folks asking what I think about the "price collar" approach in this bill, especially the price ceiling that appears to be a cap buster. In a nutshell: the price ceiling ends up being no worse than the quality of the program's offsets. (By analogy, however, getting hit by a bus is no worse than getting hit by a truck!)

I'm officially not a fan of the price ceiling, but it could wind up being okay. The program would sell whatever permits are sold at the price ceiling (i.e. above the cap) by using the reserve account -- and the reserve account is initially stocked with permits from the cap's pool. In other words, the existence of the reserve account means that there's a slight tightening of the cap in early years, which means no real cap busting. 

If the reserve is depleted then it is re-stocked by selling more offsets to create new permits. And because offsets will almost certainly be cheaper than the ceiling price, subsequent permits sold in excess of the cap will effectively get offset-plus. 

There's more explanation of these features below the jump.

Okay, now let's dig in.