Obama’s Cabinet Greenery
By Paul Taylor
www.taylorenvironmental.net
President-elect Barack Obama’s initial agency department secretary nominees for State, Treasury, Defense and Housing and Urban Development were greeted as moderates, or at least familiar Clinton-era casting. However, Obama’s nominees for Energy Secretary, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator and his new White House climate policy czar are the sort of green-blooded partisans whose ecopolitics are a threat to America’s economic recovery and future prosperity. Obama’s more recent nominees for The Department of the Interior Secretary and chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are also climate activists. All would move precipitously to a “cap-and-trade” system where carbon dioxide (CO2) emission credits are bought and sold under government market regulations in pursuit of greenhouse gas reductions and global warming mitigation. Governments actually think that they can use CO2 as a global climate change thermostat.
Cap-and-trade CO2 control systems were first adopted by European Union (EU) countries in the last several years. The theoretical climate benefit of cap-and-trade systems is that by charging companies for the right to emit CO2, the government forces them to switch to low-carbon technologies. Governments would limit (“cap”) the amount of CO2 their countries can emit. To meet their carbon reductions, domestic companies have to pay for conversion to low-carbon fuels, and/or install expensive CO2 pollution control equipment, and/or buy annual government permits to exceed CO2 caps at a current rate of about $21 per ton. The EU’s cap-and-trade system has so far failed both the environmental goals and the market goals. And more importantly, the actual long-term business costs of cap-and-trade are not known.
As for Obama’s cabinet greenery, take Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, Ph.D. who has been tapped for Energy Secretary. Chu became director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California after receiving the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for research in methods to trap atoms with lasers. Chu has since distinguished himself in California with calls for the government to issue renewable energy mandates, including a carbon dioxide (CO2) cap-and-trade system that would drive up the operating costs of power plants, refineries and most all manufacturing companies that use carbon-based energy. Moreover, such mandates would universally inflate the costs of all products and services. Given his radical policy preferences, it comes as no surprise that Chu is a genuine tree hugger, or, more literally, tree sitter. In 2007, he was among six Berkeley Nobel laureates who climbed into campus trees to protest global warming for a Vanity Fair photo spread.
But, Chu is not Obama’s only troubling pick. Carol Browner, formerly President Clinton’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is Obama’s appointee to be the new White House climate policy czar. Upon her appointment, Browner could not resist a parting shot at President Bush by demanding that the next president's priority should be to reverse the Bush administration’s decision to stop California from regulating car and truck greenhouse gas emissions. Browner thus sided with radical environmentalist groups like the National Resources Defense Council, which, along with fellow eco-nonprofits, has spent millions in incessant litigation of this matter. Eco-nonprofits have become a taxpayer-subsidized “axis of antagonism.” They prosper from solicitous fear mongering campaigns to get stricter environmental regulations from local, state and federal governments without regard for the business costs of such regulations. Ultimately, Bush had the better of that argument. The Supreme Court has consistently held that auto air pollutants are for the federal government to regulate – not the states. The Bush Administration has had the practical business sense to understand that a hodgepodge of individual state dictates for auto exhaust emission controls would only hasten the demise of American auto makers.
Joining Browner in the administration will be Lisa Jackson, the former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, who has been named the new Administrator of the EPA. Like Browner, Jackson also led her state's efforts to regulate auto greenhouse gas emissions.
Obama’s environmental nominees and appointees have a great deal in common. For instance, they share an indifference to the necessary national effort to expand nuclear power plants beyond the 104 plants that presently provide about 18 percent of our electric power. Nuclear power plants emit no greenhouse gases -- zero carbon footprint. Yet, Obama’s green cabinet is against expansion of carbon-neutral nuclear facilities. As disturbing as the policy positions of Obama’s new green regime are the records of such policies. The reflex to impose carbon controls via a cap-and-trade system has a very bad precedent in the European Union's attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate global warming. Carbon trading schemes derive from the Kyoto Protocol under the UN sanctions of 1997. The efficacy of the EU’s cap-and-trade system has been estimated to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by less than 5 percent in recent years – far short of the overall Kyoto reduction targets of 20 to 40 percent. It was no coincidence that during a recent UN climate summit in Brussels, several EU nations began wrangling vigorously for carbon permit exemptions due to the financial burdens of carbon permit requirements.
With the U.S. and other world economies in recession, initiatives to impose cap-and-trade regulations on industries and power generators could not come at a worse time. The U.S. already spends about 5 percent of GDP on environmental controls. Using broad UN estimates of the cost for Kyoto-like controls, U.S. costs for environmental controls could ultimately increase by 40 percent with carbon cap-and-trade or direct carbon taxation from an Obama administration.
President-Elect Obama proposes to create 5 million new green jobs in a decade – creating a new “green economy.” This would represent at least $15 billion a year of his new government stimulus package. His ideas to employ people in residential weatherization, in erecting wind farms and solar panels, and in constructing upgrades of America’s electrical power grid would presumably save the planet from a global warming holocaust, and restart the economy in yet another very expensive Keynesian government spending spree. This is socialism with a green wrapper.
Obama’s planned green economy, along with many of his other “smart” plans, will first collide with the realities of our depleted U.S. Treasury with coincident skyrocketing national debt in an ongoing recessionary global economy. Second, none of the fanciful “alternative,” “green,” “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” or “carbon neutral” technologies will attract essential investment capital or create new green markets when a barrel of oil sells for less than $70 on world markets. Last quarter the EU’s index of green capital investments fell by 25%.
Obama’s green cabinet is instructive in this regard. If Obama’s initial cabinet appointments could be interpreted as moves to the center, his environmental picks tell a very different tale. He’s taken a sharp, green left turn.
Paul Taylor is an environmental scientist, policy analyst, speaker and author of the new book “Climate of Ecopolitics: A Citizen’s Guide.”
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