The Solve Climate blog has this interesting bit of news today, headline, “Climate bill earmarks $500 million for clean coal ‘admin. expenses.”
According to the story:
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has been trying for the past year to get Congress to set up an independent corporation dedicated to clean coal development. He introduced the Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Act (HR 6258), which provoked some hearings in 2008, but it went nowhere and died. So this spring he reintroduced the bill, virtually unchanged (HR 1689).
What happened next is further proof of the enormous leverage Boucher wields as a coal state Democrat in shaping national climate legislation.
His bill was incorporated wholesale as pages 52-75 into the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), the climate bill Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are shepherding through the House.
It goes on:
It would create the Carbon Storage Research Corporation and funnel $10 billion to support the corporation over the next 10 years, with up to $500 million designated simply for “administrative expenses” to be spent at the discretion of its officers.
The most curious part is where all that money is going to come from. The answer: from every ratepayer who uses electricity, in the form of an almost invisible tax that would average 50-cents-a-month and conveniently referred to as an “assessment.”
Interestingly:
There is no parallel provision in the Waxman-Markey bill to set up a a federally created corporation … to support solar or wind energy development at such an astonishingly generous scale.
Read the whole thing here. And remember, the coal industry is against the Waxman-Markey bill …
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I wonder if there is anything in waxman-markey bill that would require money spent for renewables to be manufactured in the US.
Ken:
“What happened next is further proof of the enormous leverage Boucher wields as a coal state Democrat in shaping national climate legislation.”
And thank God for that leverage. Without it, the local and state economies of southwestern Virginia, most of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and eastern Ohio would soon be in free fall if this legislation passes without a way to quickly fund the development of CCS technology to meet the proposed reduction targets and timelines. What Rep. Boucher has accomplished on behalf of coal miners, their families and the communities where they live is nothing short of heroic.
I understand that the folks at Solve Climate and other groups want to see an end to the use of coal entirely and believe spending money on CCS is bad – even if it works and becomes economically feasible on a commercial scale for base load coal plants. They are entitled to that opinion, no matter how damaging to our nation’s short- and long-term energy security and the economic viability of coalfield communities it may be.
But I and plenty of other folks disagree with that position. The issue of climate change is a global problem and the key to solving climate change is CCS. There is no rush or outcry in China, India and other developing countries to stop using coal. They’re going to continue burning coal to generate electricity for decades to come no matter what the US does in regards to climate change, and no matter if CCS technology is developed or not. But if it is developed, they’ll use it. So, the right answer for the world community is to do what we can to develop and deploy CCS on an industrial, worldwide scale. That’s what the less-than 50-cents a month fee will enable us to begin working to do.
The blogger at Solve Climate complains about that fee on ratepayers’ electric bills. Frankly, six bucks a year is an exceedingly small price to pay to develop technology that will lead to decades of environmentally-friendly electricity generation and stabilizing global greenhouse gas emissions. The truth is that it’s a refreshingly up-front way to pay for this, instead of adding a production tax on coal or a generation fee payable by power companies. Those would just be passed on to ratepayers in one form or another.
As a ratepayer who will be subject to that fee, I’ll be glad to pay it, just as I am glad to spend a little extra to buy American-made cars, clothing and other products. In doing so, I’m doing something good for my country and good for my fellow citizens. And in this case, it can also make a difference for people around the world.
Mr. Smith,
Two questions:
1) What do you think about the $500 million in “admin expenses’? None of that will reach the local economies of coal states or the coal miners. That ought to scandalize anyone, anywhere.
2) Would you also be willing to spend another 5o cents a month to support solar and wind technology development?
I did not complain about the fee on ratepayers bills, exactly. I pointed out the hypocrisy of those who scared the public about a fictitious “light switch tax” and then went ahead and imposed one of their own in stealth.
Personally, I’d even be happy to pay two dollars a month if I knew three quarters of that would be going to the nascent clean energy technologies that really need our support.
Right now as it’s written, the law picks a winner — CCS — and will take my two quarters every month. This is a national law, not Rep Boucher’s law, or the coal states’ law alone.
That seems to me to be the point of the story.
David:
I think 5% per year of the total funding to administer the program isn’t at all out of line with administrative costs of any other program or of a business, for that matter. Indeed, if it’s only 5% then I am tempted to assume that it would be doing pretty good in comparison with other government programs, though I must say I haven’t run any numbers to compare that with.
And yes, I’d be happy to pay another 6 bucks a year to support solar and wind technology development. I think that, too, is a good long-term investment in our nation’s future. We are going to need energy from every source we can get.
I would disagree with you, though, about it being done in stealth. It wasn’t trumpeted from the rooftops (something that costs people money rarely is in Washington, so this should come as no surprise), but nobody hid it in undecipherable language, either.
You don’t need $50 million in order to give away funding to a very small universe of potential recipients. Your talking about a program that will support 5 or 10 or 20 projects — or something close to that scale. Tell you what. I’ll administer the program for $25 million a year for the next ten years.
The program was structured quite cleverly as an industry self-assessment to avoid scrutiny from the Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over matters of taxation. And just as cleverly, the legal language says — close to the end of the section — “oh by the way, utilities can recover the cost of the self-assessment from ratepayers.”
This is the real light switch tax, and probably one that most Americans would be happy to pay — if the proceeds went to all energy technologies, not just CCS.
The issue of what importance and priority and therefore what funding should be given to CCS is complex, and in the absence of real-world data, there can be no obvious answers to a disinterested person.
But who is a disinterested person?
People who make a living mining coal, people who are invested in coal reserves or communities that exist because of coal mining, are hardly disinterested. Of course they see CCS as a deservedly high priority.
To many people who take a long-run look at the dangers of global warming, and the overwhelming reality of increasing demand for energy all over the world, it seems that if CCS cannot be made to work, humanity is likely headed for a global train wreck of famine, war, and suffering on a massive scale. If this is the case, they ask — how can we not afford to do whatever we can to try to make it work?
Others, including those who have good grounds to be skeptical of the likelihood that CCS will be a big part of reducing atmospheric carbon emissions, and people who detest the other environmental externalities of coal mining, see CCS as more of a boondoggle than a boon.
There are good and sincere people in all of these camps (there are idiots and BS-ers in all of them, too.)
I think Obama is onto something when he says that the beginning of wisdom lies in acknowledging that we can have honest differences, that no one has all the answers and we all have our biases, and that we need to find common ground whenever we can.