Photo by Phil Romans: Flickr

Today, the House is supposed to vote on the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” Also known as the Waxman-Markey bill or the cap-and-trade bill, the legislation is mis-named. It should be called “The 2009 Lawyer-Lobbyist Full Employment Act.” The bill is 1,201 pages of complex regulations that aim to do just about everything, including:

• Cut US carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 – a level at which America’s per-capita emissions would be on par with the current-day emissions levels from such economic powerhouses as North Korea, Syria and Cuba. (I’m not making this up.)

• Impose new mandates for renewable energy and efficiency.
• Create a system that caps carbon dioxide emissions from large industrial plants like power generators and refineries. The system would be based on an ever-shrinking pool of carbon allowances that could be traded among various companies and investors.
• Create a new federal agency: the Clean Energy Deployment Administration.
• Increase the use of carbon capture and sequestration.
• Increase the use of electric cars.
• Prevent destruction of tropical forests.
• Cure premature baldness and teenage acne. (Sorry. I made that one up.)

While some of the items listed above may be laudable, the bill will only create more bad energy policy. There are many reasons to doubt the effectiveness of the legislation. In particular, no one knows how much it will cost, it does nothing to increase domestic production of hydrocarbons, it creates a trading scheme that is ripe for abuse, and it further promotes the ethanol scam. Need another reason to be skeptical? The caption on the bill says it is designed to “achieve energy independence.” For the full text of the bill go here.

First, cost. Proponents claim it will cost American families “less than a postage stamp per day.” But the Heritage Foundation and other critics have estimated the costs could be enormous. A particularly vexing problem with the legislation is that it doesn’t differentiate among the states and their various energy mixes. For instance, West Virginia, Indiana, and Wyoming are part of a group of states that get more than 90 percent of their electricity from coal-fired power plants. That means they will pay far more under the legislation than would states like Idaho and Oregon, both of which rely heavily on hydropower.

The bill offers no ideas about how to increase the domestic production of oil and natural gas. Like it or not, those two sources are the main drivers of the US economy. Together they account for 64.4 percent of US primary energy use. And yet the new bill focuses almost solely on renewable energy sources.

Proponents of the bill are ignoring the fact that Enron (remember Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay?) desperately wanted caps on carbon dioxide because they saw huge profits in being able to trade carbon allowances. And now Congress wants to give Wall Street traders – the same pirates who helped engineer the financial meltdown – a mandate that requires a massive new trading business that has the potential to be gamed in the same way that Enron gamed the California electricity market? Furthermore, they are claiming that the carbon dioxide trading market will be just like the acid rain. That’s patently false. The acid raid trading system that helped reduce the amount of sulfur dioxide released by coal-fired power plants only affected on segment of one industry. The cap and trade system that will be mandated if the House bill becomes law will affect every large industrial plant in the country. Furthermore, the acid rain issue was one that was unique to one segment of the planet: the eastern US. Carbon dioxide emissions are a global issue that will require a global response. Anyone who thinks that China and India will voluntarily agree to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions – particularly those coming from their new coal-fired power plants – hasn’t been paying attention.

Finally, the bill contains yet more pork for the ethanol scam. It includes a provision that could require every new car sold in the US to be capable of burning fuel containing 85 percent ethanol. That proposal – which has been flogged by the neoconservative ideologues at a group called Set America Free – has been bouncing around for years. And it couldn’t get passed as a stand-along piece of legislation. So it has been tucked into the cap and trade bill. And it has been included even though numerous studies have shown that the corn ethanol scam produces as much – or more -- greenhouse gases than conventional motor fuel.

The inclusion of the ethanol scam shows that this monster legislative initiative is not about climate change or energy policy. If Congress were serious – truly serious – about trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and overall energy consumption, it would pass a simple carbon tax. But a straightforward piece of legislation like that wouldn’t be nearly so profitable for the lawyers and lobbyists who are running the show in Washington. And so we are stuck with H.R. 2454, aka cap and trade, aka Waxman-Markey.

The bill appears likely to pass the House. We can only hope the Senate has more sense.