Candidates Agree On Need To Address Global Warming

Continued...A top environmental goal of both candidates is enactment of climate-change legislation centered on a “cap and trade” mechanism that sets a ceiling on emissions that declines over time. Businesses and institutions that cannot hit the targets must buy permits from those that achieve bigger cuts than required.

The devil on such bills is in the many details. (A fight over such details also contributed to the death of a climate bill that the Senate debated earlier this year.)

The permits issued under Obama’s bill would be bought by businesses through an auction before they were traded. Obama says he would use $150 billion of the auction revenue over 10 years - a small amount of the total flow - to help improve nonpolluting vehicles, wind and solar power, technology for capturing emissions from power plants, and other energy technologies. The brunt of the funds, he says, would help lessen costs faced by industries and citizens affected by the transition to a low-carbon economy. McCain’s approach, according to his Web site, would distribute the permits initially at no cost, and move to auctioning “eventually.”

Some economists and environmentalists have criticized the distribution of free permits as a handout to industry, noting that the European Union - which initially set up its trading system that way - saw the prices for pollution permits collapse. At the same time, some European power companies made windfall profits from their permits and ultimately greenhouse gas emissions increased.

McCain also would initially allow businesses to meet all their emission targets either directly or by buying a kind of credit, called an offset, generated by, say, a landowner who can prove fields or trees are sopping up a certain tonnage of carbon dioxide or a business that can prove an investment avoided emissions that would otherwise have happened. His Web site says the fraction of emission reductions allowed through offsets “would decline over time,” but offers no specifics. Calls and e-mail messages to the McCain campaign were not answered.

Environmentalists tend to prefer Obama’s approach, which many analysts say has less wiggle room and, in theory, sends a stronger message to companies that rely on fossil fuels to seek nonpolluting sources or reduce energy use.

Several representatives of industries said that, if forced, they would prefer the less aggressive targets and looser terms of McCain’s plan, but some appear to think they will not need to choose for a long while in any case, given the state of the global economy.

“Most industries are sort of keeping their powder dry at this point,” said Scott H. Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani who represents energy companies.

Without more details, it is not possible to estimate the costs of either candidate’s cap-and-trade plan, but economists generally agree that McCain’s would be less costly because of the offsets, but such offsets may also delay real decreases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite McCain’s early focus on climate change and the need for legislation, some environmental groups have sharply chided him lately, pointing to campaign statements seemingly softening his stance on firm caps on heat-trapping gases.

The League of Conservation Voters gave him the lowest possible score for his voting record in 2007 on subsidies or spending for renewable energy. Environmental bloggers derided his choice of running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has questioned whether global warming is caused by human activity and who elicits chants of “drill, baby, drill” on the stump for her support of oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

McCain and Obama also support ocean drilling but both oppose drilling in the Arctic refuge. McCain “has provided ample evidence in the last year or so that he is not serious about clean energy and he has increasingly walked away from the climate issue,” said Joseph Romm, a physicist who writes the ClimateProgress.org blog and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit research group generally aligned with Democrats.

Obama, after taking heat from some environmentalists for championing coal use as an Illinois state senator, has been hailed by environmental groups for sticking with a mandatory cap on emissions with steadily rising costs for permits bought by polluters.

Still, his advisers lately have emphasized that he might have to compromise to get bipartisan support for a climate bill, something he has said he wants. Strident opponents of climate legislation, echoing the views of industry figures, do not appear worried that a bill will come together any time soon, no matter who is in the White House.

“I believe the current financial difficulties will only reinforce the public’s concerns about any climate bill that attempts to increase the costs of energy and jeopardizes jobs in the near term,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma.

Van Jones, an environmental activist from Oakland, California, and the author of “The Green Collar Economy,” has criticized McCain as the vanguard of a new movement with an environmental veneer, but bad intentions.

“The climate deniers got chased out of town, but in their place you’ve got the rise of the Dirty Greens,” he said in a recent interview. These are “people saying ‘I’m for solar, wind, geothermal, but I’m also for tar sands, coastal drilling’.”

Over all, the hurdles facing legislation restricting gases released by burning coal and oil, which still underpin the economy, remain so daunting that many experts who favor capping emissions appear to be focusing on actions a president could take with a pen stroke.Continued...