Al Gore's appearance before Senate EPW
Posted to Author: Vranes, K. | Climate Change
Today's climate change hearing at Senate EPW with Al Gore as sole witness just finished. A few thoughts.
The hearing had a format slightly altered from the usual, with Chair Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe giving opening statements, Mr. Gore getting 30 minutes to talk, Inhofe getting 15 minutes to question him, then the rest of the Senators getting their chances.
Sen. Inhofe tried hard to clown the hearing into irrelevance but Boxer struggled successfully to keep him in line and Gore did a good job of battling back. By the end of the hearing it was pretty clear that Inhofe has been pushed out to the fringes. He already was, of course, but previously he has had caucus members either behind him or willing to read directly from his sheaf of talking points. This time when the dust settled he looked startlingly alone.
During his talk Mr. Gore pushed a bunch of ideas, some of which were new and worth highlighting.
• The biggest bombshell was his second proposal: eliminate employment/payroll taxes and replace the revenue with a new carbon/pollution tax. This is the first time I've heard Mr. Gore specifically endorse a carbon tax, which automatically gives it new life in the policy debate. But more startling is the proposed revenue offset by eliminating payroll taxes.
• Mr. Gore's fourth proposal was to place an immediate moratorium on any new coal plant that is not outfitted with carbon capture and storage (sequestration) technology (CCS). This point was refreshed again and again throughout the hearing, especially as coal-state Senators asked their questions. This proposal is perhaps most interesting because it is not currently feasible and doesn't look like it'll be able to be implemented any time soon, so essentially Mr. Gore is saying, "stop building coal plants right now."
• The sixth proposal was to create an "electronet," meaning a distributed power system where small scale (to the level of individual homes) generators could put their power on the grid. This is an idea that has been around for a while and is the current buzz in clean energy policy, pushed pretty strongly by Amory Lovins and RMI. The thought is that centralized power in the form of massive coal and nuke plants is less efficient than distributed energy that can be used directly by the producer with excess sold back to the grid.
• The eighth proposal was to create a new federal mortgage lender that specifically deals in carbon neutral energy upgrades to homes (and call it "Connie Mae" following Fannie Mae). It was hard for me to grasp where he was going with this, but as far as I could tell it would be a lending instrument to borrow money for efficiency upgrades against the saving in energy costs produced by the upgrades. The loan would become a market-tradable financial instrument like home loans.
• Finally, Mr. Gore pressed for corporations to be required to disclose their carbon emissions to shareholders. He didn't say it, but I assume he meant that it would go on corporate SEC filings. This is something that has already been going around in the business world a bit, with companies starting to wonder if they need to disclose.
On the science: I was disappointed to see Mr. Gore stretching the science to his audience of Senators, but I'm willing to concede to Tom Yulsman (made in the 3rd comment to this post) that: "Should Gore be faulted for being an advocate? By definition, that's what politicians do. He is making a strong case for action, so of course he is going to emphasize some of the worst-case scenarios while downplaying less dire possibilities." Still, in his hearing testimony Mr. Gore highlighted recent sightings of manatees in unusual places, fires in Oklahoma and fires "raging out of control" all over the west as prime examples of global warming. I'm sticking to my point: Mr. Gore is representing the science now in a far more prominent way than any scientist, his words and presentations are based on many, many meetings with top climate scientists, and thus in a very real way, Mr. Gore is representing scientists. This time it wasn't even future projections but current events. No scientist would call the sighting of one manatee far up the Atlantic coast a clear indication of global warming. (These things happen –my graduate school advisor wrote a note in Nature describing why it wasn't strange to find coelacanths in the Sulawesi Sea.) The use of those examples to say "this is global warming, right here, right now!!" is perhaps not representing the science well.
Finally, some quick thoughts on Mr. Gore's interactions with the individual Senators on the panel. As the hearing went on I started to focus more on the R's than the D's and I finally realized why: the D's have been on board for a while, but up to this point the R's have been stalling. They aren't any longer, and almost to a person the R's made loud and positive noises about accepting the science and wanting to do something about it. So I started wanting to hear the next R, to hear how he (no female R's on EPW right now) was positioning himself on climate change, knowing that the R's are playing catch up.
Inhofe vs. Gore: Mr. Inhofe tried to trap Mr. Gore into a pledge to not use more energy than the average American household and to not use offsets/credits to buy off his increased energy use. This was a direct hit on the either well- or under-publicized (depending on your politics) blog post from the TN Center for Policy Research that Mr. Gore's house in TN uses more than twice the energy in one month than the average American family uses in one year. It seemed tough to wiggle out of but Mr. Gore responded by saying he buys wind power. Should have ended the conversation right there, but Inhofe had to keep clowning about it, of course. Still, I think Gore made his point.
Sen. Isakson (R-GA) was the first of many to push nuclear. Roger discussed Gore and nuclear previously here and Gore hasn't shifted much. He held throughout the hearing that nuclear would be part of the energy solution but only a small part. When pushed by the many pro-nuclear Senators he said the biggest reason for his bearish attitude was the cost. But I have to say: the cost-per-BTU of nuclear vs. the cost-per-BTU of coal with full CCS installed? I'm not sure CCS-coal is going to win that one.
Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) made a point I've been pushing for a while: that we are already passed the political tipping point for movement on climate change. I think if you consider the rhetoric and tone of the debate both among the elected and in the press, we are passed a tipping point on moving on climate change. Lieberman made the point that we better get past that political tipping point before we hit the climatological tipping point, which I suppose is a reference to a sudden Atlantic meridional overturning shutdown (few believe this is an immediate threat). Gore, however, disagreed that we've reached a political tipping point. But if we are not yet passed a tipping point, that implies that we could still slide back down, forget about all this and do nothing on climate change. I don't think that's going to happen; I think action is inevitable.
Sen. Craig (R-ID) pushed nuclear again (Idaho has a big national nuke lab) and accused the Clinton/Gore administration of killing some important nuclear funding. I find that pretty comical considering that Congress appropriates and Senator Craig has a very plush position on the approps committee. Craig also mentioned a new Dorgan/Craig bill on CAFE standards, but when I looked on Thomas I didn't see anything yet.
Sen. Baucus (D-MT) is an important voice in this debate because he is Chair of the Finance Committee. Remember Gore's proposal to kill payroll taxes and replace them with pollution (carbon) taxes? Anything like that would start and end with Baucus. And I have to say, Gore reiterated instituting a carbon tax and Baucus actually looked interested and engaged in thinking about it. Baucus also proclaimed his support for a cap-and-trade system and was adamant that it be economy-wide (i.e. not sector-based) without exemptions. Gore ended the interaction by saying, "put a price on carbon – tax is the best way, cap-and-trade will also do it."
Sen. Clinton (D-NY) is clearly engaged in the meat of these issues, regardless of her D'08 status. She asked pointed questions about whether we would need both a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade and when Gore said we should have both, she wanted to know how and why it would work to have both. (Kudos to her, I was wondering the same thing.) She also wanted more detail on the Connie Mae mortgage scheme and got into a quick back-and-forth with Gore on the details. Clinton's questions on the detail reminded me of her portrait in Joshua Green's Atlantic Monthly article.
Sen. Thomas (R-WY) – Here's where I saw the best bit of psychology of the afternoon. You could just tell from his first question/comment and demeanor that Thomas, like almost everybody else, was on board with trying to do something about climate. That he's from a coal state is only part of the equation; every time coal came up Gore went straight to the CCS card. But then Thomas, suddenly reading from his crib sheet, had to go to the standard dumb question about if weather prediction is bad so why can we rely on climate models? followed on by another ill-prepared skeptic standard. His staff should be fired.
Sen. Carper (D-DE) (one of my favorite policy wonk Senators) got into an exchange with Gore about the allocation of carbon pollution permits and input vs. output based caps. Gore had a chance to reiterate that if a cap-trade scheme comes along the permits should be auctioned, not distributed. Fine bit of inside policy there.
I've skipped a few of the more mundane exchanges. The hearing ended back with Sen. Boxer remarking that, "Senator Inhofe was waiting for this chance to have this conversation." And I'm sure he was. And he got rooked.
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