Articles by Brian Beutler

How to tell whoppers and get away with it

The basic trick is to show up looking nice, well dressed, civil, and then, in a composed voice, lie and dissemble to your heart's content. All in evidence at today's hearing, focused on coal and carbon capture, of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.): "Some estimates that I read are that the cost of [a carbon] cap would increase the cost of electricity to the consumer by as much as 45 percent."

Well, perhaps. But here we have an analysis from George Bush's EPA of the Climate Stewardship Act (cosponsors John McCain and Joe Lieberman). On page 3, it reads:

Electricity prices are projected to increase 22% in 2030 and 25% in 2050, assuming the full cost of allowances are passed on to consumers (as is the case in a full auction). If allowances are given directly to power companies, the cost of those allowances would not be passed on to consumers in regulated electricity markets, so electricity price increases would be lower in much of the country.

After delaying action against climate change, Big Coal is now scheming to cash in

For readers out there who understand the climate crisis well (I assume basically all of you), a lot of this will be recap, but today's hearing underscored how desperate the situation really is and how urgently it needs to be addressed. That urgency is a source, at least to me, of tremendous frustration.

To a great extent, we've reached this point precisely because energy industries and their political patrons spent years blocking action, rejecting science, and rhetorically casting "alarmists" as cartoonish hippie-fascists. So successful were their efforts that we now face a crisis of such magnitude that the very same actors are using the urgency they created to bully lawmakers into providing them significant handouts in order to fix the problem.

As my previous post points out (or was meant to point out), the bullying is proving effective. This post is a reminder that it's only effective because things look pretty dire.

The word from today’s hearing of Markey’s climate committee

As I suggested earlier, the crux of today's hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change was to suggest that carbon capture and storage is necessary quickly, via enormous government subsidies, or else we're screwed.

Remember, this is Ed Markey's committee. He's the guy who's supposed to advise Congress about upcoming climate-change legislation, and, for all intents and purposes, he's an ally to Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the environmentally minded members of the Democratic caucus.

This we expect from Markey:

There are over 150 new coal-fired power plants on the boards in the United States, and globally, it is predicted that something on the order of 3,000 such plants will be built by 2030. These new plants alone would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent and global emissions by 30 percent. That would spell disaster for the planet.

But this?

Fortunately, carbon capture and storage -- or 'CCS' -- offers a path forward for coal ... All indications are that CCS is a viable interim solution to the coal problem.

Markey taking this line means that if we're lucky enough to see major action out of Congress on climate change, CCS is going to be a huge part of it. But we already knew that, right?

Reporting from a coal hearing of the House Select Cmte. on Global Warming

If you dream of a near future in which coal mines are abandoned, coal workers are employed in emerging green energy fields, coal executives are feeding at the trough of welfare assistance (and not corporate welfare), and China and India are all too happy to buy our clean technologies at a healthy price ... well, then it's good you didn't attend this morning's hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Climate Change.

I'll be posting a few entries here detailing the most significant ground Markey's hearing covered. But the nickel version is that, though everybody from the governor of Wyoming to the wonks at the Center for American Progress think a cap-and-trade program is inevitable, they also think that many, many billions of dollars in subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration technology will be crucial to any greenhouse-gas reduction strategy.

Which is to say that I had a rollicking and hilarious morning!