The highest level investigation of global warming in the history of the U.S. Congress began Wednesday morning when Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), chairman of the brand-spanking new House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, banged down the gavel. (And by new, I mean new. The committee does not even have a web site. If you go to www.house.gov and click on the link for committees, there is no link to the committee.)
Markey has been a leader on energy issues in the Congress for more than 3 decades, and comes from the wing of the Democratic Party that is strongly committed to pushing the United States to rejoin the rest of the world in fighting global warming after 6 years of official neglect by the Bush administration. (The name of the committee is unfortunate, since every single witness on today’s panel agreed that the United States was unlikely to ever be “energy independent.”)
In their opening statements, the panel’s Republicans were clear and unequivocal—Select Committee or no Select Committee, they intended to battle on against the threat of godless environmentalism and its fellow traveling sidekick, global warming. (You know, I really wish that you could accuse me of being a little out of control here with these “Red Scare” metaphors resurrected from the 1950s, but read on. Who knows, you might find that you’re one of those dangerous “extremists” who want to “wreck our economy.”)
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the ranking Republican on the committee, was quick to lay down some know-nothing markers. He said that “this debate [which immediately signals that he is disregarding the latest IPCC report, in which a global consensus of thousands of scientists agreed there was at least a 90% chance that human activities were responsible for the observed warming of the planet] has not been characterized by common sense [can you hear the sound of a straw man rumbling in your direction?], it’s been characterized by extremism [the straw man arrives, since Sensenbrenner provides no examples to support this claim, while using a word closely linked to terrorism, the Red smear of our age].” These unnamed extremists have “created a lot of hot air...and introduced a lot of fear.” He cited a recent Washington Post article on how kids were handling climate change: “With all the scary news we all have read, how can you blame kids for being scared?”
Sensenbrenner then lurched into a flailing attack on former vice president Al Gore. Gore’s movie says there might be a 20-foot rise in sea level, Sensenbrenner said, but the latest UN panel estimated that the rise would be only 23 inches: “There’s a world of difference between 20 feet and 3 inches.” (Sensenbrenner has thrown up another straw man here. As many scientists have pointed out, the IPCC sea-level rise estimates do not take into account the possible effects of the melting of the Greenland ice cap, or the melting of ice in Antarctica, because it was not possible to model this ice-melting.)
Finally Sensenbrenner got to his punch line: “One thing is certain is that solutions [no mention of what those solutions might be, aren’t we all just supposed to know what they are?] imposed by extremists [this straw man is working hard today] would have devastating effects on our economy [yet another completely undocumented and unfounded claim.] (Later in the day, Sensenbrenner returned to this imagery of destruction, arguing that the range of advice from the panelists “shows how difficult it is for policy makers to figure out a way to lead us from our dependence on oil in a way that will not wreck our economy….No one wants to wreck our economy. (Emphasis added)
In Sensenbrenner’s view, the very topic of the hearing was over-reaching: “Why is global warming suddenly an issue of national defense?” He said he did agree we should reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and should use a lot more nuclear power. Whatever we do should be done “without devastating our economy [there’s that “devastating” word again], throwing people out of work, and outsourcing jobs to third-world countries.”
Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) used some similar language to Sensenbrenner’s. Shadegg said he welcomed this “debate on climate change” where members could weight the science as well as the cost and benefits. Opening a different line of attack on the elevation of global warming as a national security issue, Shadegg said that “extreme poverty in developing nations is also a potential national security concern…there are countless potential national security concerns.”
Shadegg continued with what, coming from a Democratic member, he would surely have characterized as a “bleeding heart liberal” argument, waxing on about how India had 300 million people living on $1 a day, and 700 million on $2 a day or less. How could we expect policy makers to limit economic growth, Shadegg asked [a question that conflates economic growth with energy growth, when there are many examples of countries which have achieved significant economic growth while at the same reducing holding per capita energy use steady, showing that this claim of an absolute linkage is just plain false.]
In her remarks, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned whether the U.S. really had an energy problem at all: “We have vast reserves of oil and gas on land and in the sea that are not being tapped.” [She did not come back to this claim, nor did any of the witnesses, so it remains to be discovered just how vast Blackburn believes these reserves to be.] She also questioned whether climate change was really such a big deal: “The U.S. currently has several existing threats to its national security…has climate change risen to the level of these immediate dangers?” It would be unwise, she counseled for us to focus on the “speculative dangers” of global warming when there were so many other more pressing threats.
For Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), the hearing was a chance to environmentalists and the policies of the U.S. Forest Service: “There are those advocating that we do everything we can [to reduce global warming], but they’re also the very people who don’t want us to do anything to manage our forests.” Walden said that in a large 2003 forest fire in Oregon, in a couple of weeks the fire produced two times as many greenhouse gases as the entire economy of Oregon emits in a year.
Markey had rounded up as unimpeachable blue-ribbon panel of witnesses as one could imagine, a panel that provided very little satisfaction to these Republican critics. The panelists were:
General Gordon Sullivan, chairman of the Military Advisory Board to the CAN Corporation Report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”
Richard N. Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations
Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club
Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN, Retired
R. James Woolsey, Co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
To a person, they agreed that global warming was real, that global warming was an acute problem, and that global warming created an array of serious threats to the country’s national security. They all agreed that the U.S. needed to develop the technology to capture and sequester CO2 from the burning of coal, and that we did not have those technologies today. Raising the fuel economy standard for America’s auto fleet was absolutely necessary. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gases offered the United States enormous economic opportunities to create new jobs and expand U.S. exports. And they all agreed that there was no “silver bullet” solution in sight; the country would need a strategy combining many different approaches to reduce consumption, and to develop alternative fuels to replace oil.
My favorite statement of the day, in terms of speaking truth to power, was buried late in the day. Asked to give a one minute summation about what the members of the committee should take away from the hearing, the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope took dead aim at the Congress itself, and the hidden and corrupting power of Big Oil, Gas, Coal, and Nuclear:
The largest single barrier to innovation and progress is that the United States Congress has structured the American energy sector that those who benefit from innovation are frustrated by those who benefit from stagnation. We need to fix the way Congress thinks about energy.
Vice Admiral McGinn threw cold water on any notion that the U.S. could drill itself to energy independence. The U.S. consumes 25% of the world’s oil, but has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. Even if we could double our reserves to 6%, McGinn said we would not be much better off than we are today.
General Sullivan explained the linkage between global warming and national security, casting global warming as a “threat multiplier”:
“We’re looking at threat multipliers. Somalia is case in point, we lost 19 men. At its heart, drought caused a lack of food, the instability created by drought caused warlords to try to control food coming in from NGOs, and conflict erupted. Migration, Somalis moving in Kenya and Ethiopia, same thing is what’s driving Darfur. There has to be some recognition that these issues are at the heart environmentally related.”
Woolsey noted that the war in Iraq was perhaps the first in which the United States was fully funding both sides. Americans send almost $300 billion to the Middle East to pay for imported oil, and Woolsey asserted that the unstable and often anti-U.S. governments receiving this money were transferring some of this windfall into the hands of the very terrorist organizations that the U.S. purports to be fighting in Iraq and around the globe.
The Sierra Club’s Carl Pope said that the Sierra Club and the American Solar Energy Association had released a study in January in which they found by simply exploiting existing energy efficiency and renewable technologies, the U.S. could reduce carbon emissions by 2% a year through 2030, which would put us on track for a 60-80% reduction by 2050. Pope called this approach “the 2% solution,” and said there were 4 steps to making it work:
1. Increase the fuel efficiency of cars by 4% a year, a change by 2025 would save 3 million barrels of oil a day, the equivalent to our current imports from the Persian Gulf.
2. Support the development of cellulosic ethanol.
3. Require that 20% of the nation’s energy come from renewables by 2025.
4. Adopt national energy efficiency standards.
Pope attacked President Bush’s enthusiasm for making liquid fuels from coal (coal-to-liquids, or CTL), saying that this process would double CO2 production while costing taxpayers billions. Instead of making liquid fuels from coal, Pope supported generating electricity from coal, sequestering the CO2 produced, and using the electricity to power electric hybrid cars. He predicted that this approach could produce millions of new industrial jobs.
Of the five witnesses, the one who most caught the committee’s attention was General Gordon Sullivan, who said that when he was asked to serve on the Military Advisory Board to The CNA Corporation’s report on National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, he was “a skeptic,” but that “after listening to leaders of the scientific, business and governmental communities both I and my colleagues came to agree that Global Climate Change is and will be a significant threat to our National Security and in a larger sense to our grandchildren and their children and to life on earth as we know it to be.”
Later in the questioning, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) picked up on Sullivan’s description of himself as a skeptic at the start. Was there a defining moment, when something happened that changed his mind, Cleaver asked.
Sullivan’s answer was a bit rambling, but in the midst of all the numbers and statistics, his reply showed a man who kept did not let ideology cause him to reject what he was seeing with his own eyes. He had grown up in the Northeast, and was used to wearing four layers of clothes and a cap when he was in Vermont in January. But this year, the sap never stopped running in the maple trees. And he thought about the overfishing off Cape Cod.
“Once I started getting interested, why is all this happening, I looked at what I saw, and I saw the trends. In my former life [in the military], I never had 100% certainty; if I’d stuck around waiting for certainty I’d have been killed. My epiphany was local.”
There were repeated questions about whether the witnesses thought that revving up nuclear power should be part of the solution, but the witnesses were lukewarm at best. Vice Admiral McGinn was the most positive, citing the Navy’s experience with using nuclear reactors to power ships and subs. But even McGinn was concerned about the transport of high-level nuclear wastes, and what the total cost of a kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity really was.
Rep. John Hall (D-NY) was less than enthusiastic, noting that a plant in his district was leaking tritium, and had been shut down twice accidentally in the past week. There were vast quantities of high-level nuclear waste at the country’s 103 nuclear reactors, a development “which citizens didn’t agree to.” Hall said that “every city and state between here and Yucca Mountain [the proposed repository for high-level nuclear waste]” would be in court to stop the shipment of this waste. And finally, he asked, “If we increase to hundreds or thousands of nuclear plants around the world, aren’t we virtually guaranteeing a diversion and a dirty bomb?”
The most devastating riposte to the committee’s nuclear enthusiasts came from former CIA director James Woolsey, who said that moving to nuclear as an alternative to coal would create “huge international problems” because the international system for preventing countries with nuclear power plants from developing nuclear weapons “doesn’t work.” If nuclear was going to expand massively worldwide, Woolsey said, “We would need a completely different kind of treaty” to prevent many more countries from developing nuclear weapons.
Amidst all the talk about developing new sources of supplies, and the obligatory obeisance before the altar of energy efficiency, Rep. Earl Blumenauer was a voice crying in the wilderness. The committee had heard all this talk about higher fuel efficiency standards, Blumenauer lamented, but “not a word about the car trip that is not taken, shorter trips, less frequent trips, locating federal facilities more efficiently, not more gallon of gas for a gallon of milk….Look at what we’ve done in Portland to give people choices.”
The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has no legislative jurisdiction, although several of its members mentioned filing energy legislation. General Sullivan’s testimony about his conversion from a global warming skeptic after he looked at all the evidence and thought about his grandchildren, was a small ray of hope that Markey may be able to persuade at least some of the skeptics within the House of Representatives as he goes forward. One of Markey’s aides told me that the committee might hold hearings as frequently as once a week. With that many hearings, at least Markey will have the satisfaction of knowing that he did what he could to help the Republicans hear and understand the scientific consensus that global warming is one of the greatest threats facing the entire human species.
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The Democratic members of the Select Committee are:
• Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chairman
• Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon
• Congressman Jay Inslee of Washington
• Congressman John Larson of Connecticut
• Congresswoman Hilda Solis of California
• Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota
• Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri
• Congressman John Hall of New York
• Congressman Jerry McNerney of California
The Republican members of the Select Committee are:
• Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, Ranking Member
• Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona
• Congressman Greg Walden of Oregon
• Congressman John Sullivan of Oklahoma
• Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee
• Congresswoman Candice Miller of Michigan
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