A fickle way to plan our energy future

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BY RICH CREGAR

RALEIGH -- It was James Madison who feared that the U.S. House of Representatives would act with "fickleness and passion." He fully expected the Senate to act "with more wisdom than the popular branch."

Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a game-changing energy bill, HR 2454, also known as the Clean Energy & Security Act of 2009. The bill passed with little debate and a consensus that most members voting had not even bothered to read its 1,500 pages.

Let us all hope that the Senate will live up to President Madison's expectations, take the time to read it and then either modify or reject this deeply flawed legislation.

If passed and signed into law, the bill would require the United States to reduce carbon dioxide (CO {-2}) emissions to 17 percent of the amount emitted in 2005 by 2050. In the interim, CO {-2} emission must be reduced to 83 percent of the 2005 baseline by 2020. That is just 10 years from now!

Percentages roll easily off the brain. Let's look at the numbers that lie behind them. The United States produced about 6 billion metric tons of CO {-2} in 2005. Back then our population was 296 million Americans. Doing the math, we find every American was responsible for the release of about 20 tons of CO {-2} into the atmosphere that year.

Today there are 310 million Americans, and the Census Bureau expects 341 million in 2020. HR 2454 would require that by 2020 Americans emit no more than 14.6 tons per person per year -- a 27 percent reduction in fossil energy use per citizen.

In 2050, the law will require each one of us to emit no more than 2.3 tons of CO {-2}, or about 11 percent of the amount we released per person in 2005.

To meet these goals, HR 2454 proposes a complicated "cap-and-trade" system that is unnecessary and counterproductive to the development of sustainable energies.

This cap-and-trade plan is flawed because it will allow for a nearly infinite array of games and special allowances that global corporations and their favorite members of Congress can manipulate to their benefit, undermining efforts to genuinely reduce carbon emissions.

More important, this scheme would apply to carbon emitted from any source of energy, not just emissions from fossil-based sources, such as petroleum, coal or natural gas. This provision, along with another that provides carbon emission credits for land left fallow ("land-use offsets"), creates large disincentives for using nonfossil fuels from renewable sources, such as biofuels.

Biofuels are carbon-neutral sources of energy, in contrast to fossil fuels that add large quantities of new carbon to the atmosphere. Yes, biofuels do emit carbon when consumed but only the same amounts that were captured by the plants used to make them.

Our goal should be to reduce carbon emissions as quickly as possible. Creating disincentives for fuels that would dramatically lower current emission levels -- and reduce our dependence on foreign oil -- is the wrong way to go.

As currently written, HR 2454 places a high-stakes bet that our country can transition to a world where our cars and trucks are powered by electricity. This presupposes that we can develop a vehicle fleet powered by reliable, cost-effective batteries and produce enough renewable energy (read: solar, wind and nuclear) to power it all.

This is a huge gamble, as we currently lack both the battery technology and an electrical system capable of producing and transmitting large quantities of electricity from nonfossil sources. We could end up with inefficient and underpowered vehicles fueled by massive amounts of carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

A much more rational alternative is a simple energy tax levied on every pound of fossil energy that comes out of the ground. We even have mechanisms in place that can tabulate and tax this energy.

By taxing only fossil energy, our entrepreneurial economy would be free to develop sustainable, carbon-neutral energy alternatives free of burdensome regulations and energy taxes. We would combat global warming by replacing fossil carbon fuels with a variety of carbon-neutral alternatives.

Despite the scope of the changes this bill would bring about, the House is willing to bet the family farm on this hastily drafted compromise. Yes, our representatives are passionate. What if they are also wrong?

We must hope that Madison's expectations are met and that the Senate possesses the wisdom to scrap this cap-and-trade energy tax and land-use offset in favor of a simple fossil carbon tax.

Rich Cregar is instructor of automotive systems technologies at Wake Technical Community College and a GlaxoSmithKline faculty fellow at the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State University. He is also a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels.

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