Warner-Lieberman bill raises concern

The News Virginian
Published: June 2, 2008

Confronting a perceived apocalypse, ecological messiahs John Warner and Joe Lieberman might achieve a crisis. They are the authors of a so-called cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions and avert a global meltdown, which if the senators are successful, they and America will get in a different form.
The Senate on Monday began debating the plan, which would mandate reductions in carbon to 2005 levels by 2012 and, ostensibly, cut emissions by two thirds by 2050. This would provide environmentalists with a result for which they long, forcing energy companies to turn from coal, which spews carbon but is plentiful, to natural gas, which is cleaner but more limited in supply.
If lawmakers are not careful, they also might imitate Europe, which three years ago instituted carbon caps to the remarkable effect of increased emissions.
In addition to the warming prospect of more carbon rather than less, consumers can expect to pay higher energy bills while utilities seek to offset limited supply by driving down demand for what is in civilized parts of the world a necessity. Natural gas production remained flat between 2000 and 2007, while demand increased by almost 10 percent. Prices, meanwhile, soared by 50 percent last year. That squeeze will turn into a stranglehold on consumers if the climate bill becomes law.
Further, because many natural gas companies compete in a global market, skyrocketing prices to quell demand and safeguard supply will provide competitors with an extraordinary and likely insurmountable advantage.
John McCain, the Republican senator who supports the legislation, touts clean coal technology, a seeming alternative to heavier reliance on natural gas or the recently attractive option of nuclear power. He and others who raise this prospect are not to be believed, at least not now.
Clean coal is most parts myth. The technology to which McCain and others allude is one that turns coal to gas and eases the capture of carbon. The trouble is, again, cost. Constructing new coal-to-gas plants costs 10 to 20 percent more than building the prototypical pulverized coal facility, which can cost billions of dollars. Retrofitting existing plants with coal gasification technology is widely considered infeasible.
Undaunted, backers of the Warner-Lieberman bill will tell you that forecasts of economic catastrophe as the principal product of carbon caps are exaggerated. If nothing else, their logic is consistent, just as it is absent.
Many champions of the climate bill long have denied the necessity of tapping dormant U.S. oil supplies in Alaska and the Gulf to offset the cost of foreign oil. Good thing we listened on that one. Similarly, environmentalists and their appeasers for years urged us to pursue ethanol as a gas alternative, which when heeded resulted in food and grain prices puncturing the stratosphere and revelations that there wasn’t corn enough to meet the demand.
In a place where the production of bad ideas has reached the level of art, Warner-Lieberman resembles cave murals in India and obelisks in Ethiopia. They are a marvel to behold but it’s hell getting there.