Commentary—

Congress, The Energy Stumbling Block

By Carl Pope

It’s scary how difficult it is persuading this Congress to embrace a new energy future. What’s going on here? Part of the problem is business as usual. Part is that while Congress understands health care is a national issue, it still sees energy as a regional one — one on which each representative is entitled to be as parochial as he or she desires. But part of it is a failure on the part of advocates, the media, and the political leadership to understand that America’s energy problems are rooted in a market that is fundamentally broken and that cannot be fixed by a single silver bullet such as cap and trade or a carbon tax.

Right now our government is making tremendous investments in order to build the green economy, and Congress has a duty to make sure these investments maximize the benefits to workers and the economy, as well as the environment. They must answer President Barack Obama’s call to action and pass legislation necessary to not just address climate change, but also to protect workers, and to enact a sweeping overhaul of our broken, costly, and unsustainable energy system.

The debate in Washington right now centers on the future of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a comprehensive plan currently in the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee.

So far committee Chairmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) have done heroic work in reaching agreement on the committee around a comprehensive clean energy and climate plan, a critically important milestone that has faced seemingly insuperable obstacles. Their leadership has been truly remarkable. The committee has reached agreement on a compromise version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

But it is clear that Big Oil, Big Coal, and other polluters are still holding out for a congressional bailout. They will continue to try to riddle this legislation with loopholes, water it down, and load it up with hundreds of billions of dollars in giveaways. They don’t want it to deliver a recovery fueled by the clean energy jobs that America needs.

Too many of America’s utilities are determined to keep providing Americans dirty electricity from coal. The auto industry is just as determined to feed us a diet of inefficient, gasoline-powered cars. They’ve figured out that the Obama administration and the congressional leadership badly want to pass a cap and trade bill to send a strong signal before the Copenhagen climate conference in December. And they are determined to highjack this urgent moment. Their strategy is clear: block any real reform of energy markets. Block any real commitment to reduce our dependence on oil and coal. Drag their feet to see if they can kill energy legislation altogether. If that fails, then they’ll force a symbolic “cap and trade” bill that they know they can unravel later.

What’s the solution? We need to tell our leaders that we won’t let coal and oil steal our clean energy future. We want Congress to enact not the shadow but the substance of the president’s energy platform.

A strong bill must accomplish three things to effectively jumpstart the green recovery, build the clean energy future, and end our addiction to oil and coal. It must dramatically ramp up America’s transition to cleaner, cheaper energy sources like wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal; it must slash energy waste in order to cut emissions quickly and cheaply, while saving consumers money on their energy bills; and it must close the global warming pollution loophole by making polluters pay for the greenhouse gasses they emit.

Strong legislation will also revitalize the manufacturing sector and create the industries of tomorrow. These new clean energy jobs — building wind turbines, installing solar panels, renovating buildings to make them more energy efficient, constructing the smart grid — are jobs that can’t be outsourced.

Our nation believes in its ability to innovate and solve big problems. We’ve proven time and time again we can rise to the occasion and address major environmental challenges without harming the economy: Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, acid rain.

America must act now and become the global leader in clean, renewable energy technologies to drive US economic growth and reduce global warming pollution.

(Carl Pope is executive director of Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization.)