Federal Judiciary

Good Cop, Bad Cop -- By: Stephen Spruiell

We?ve all seen the routine in movies. Two cops take turns interrogating a suspect. One comes across as brutal and perhaps just a little psychotic: You don?t want to be left alone with him. The other is more sympathetic. ?Look, my partner?s crazy -- I can?t control him -- but if you work with me, maybe we can cut a deal.?

In the debate over climate-change policy in Washington, think of the EPA as the bad cop. Yesterday the agency announced it would be moving forward with planned restrictions on power plants and factories that emit at least 100,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year. A wrongheaded Supreme Court decision in 2007 cleared the way for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases if the agency found that such gases ?may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.? The agency issued such a finding as one of the Obama administration?s first orders of business, basing its decision on the same data that last year?s major climate-research scandal called into question.

It is no coincidence that the agency?s announcement comes on the heels of the less-than-triumphant unveiling of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate. The senators pushing the bill, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, faced their first setback when they lost Republican co-sponsor Lindsey Graham, who pulled his support after Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate should work on immigration first. Graham called the move a ?cynical political ploy? designed to gin up Hispanic support for Democrats going into the 2010 election cycle. Kerry and Lieberman forged ahead without Graham only to face another setback when Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson voiced his opposition to the bill and told a Nebraska newspaper, ?There?s no way it has 60 votes.? 

Kerry and Lieberman want to be the good cop: Much like the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House last year, their legislation would come with a basket of goodies for select industrial emitters to offset the economic damage it would inflict. Like Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Lieberman would cap carbon emissions and allow emitters to trade permits -- cap and trade -- but over 70 percent of these permits would be given away rather than sold at auction. Energy prices would still go up as the caps reduced the supply of carbon-based energy, but emitters wouldn?t bear the cost -- you would, unless you qualify for certain refundable tax credits created for low-income families. That?s a feature, not a bug: The point of the bill is to make carbon-based energy more expensive for you, so that you consume less of it.

In addition to the permit giveaways, the bill allows for close to half of its emissions-reduction targets to be met through the use of offsets. The concept of offsets can be explained very simply: Plant a tree, get an offset, and use it instead of a permit to count toward your emissions ?reductions.? Offset projects have proven to be a plentiful source of waste (in some cases, such as ?manure management, composting, or anaerobic digestion projects,? literally so), and some liberal backers of tougher carbon caps would be the first to admit it. Harper?s magazine recently ran a piece titled, ?Conning the Climate,? explaining that many of these projects are of dubious environmental value. Some are just outright frauds.

With so many ways to profit from the Kerry-Lieberman bill, it is no surprise that a who?s who of corporate America supports it. Major corporate emitters are ready to cut a deal with the good cop, in other words -- and send taxpayers and ratepayers up the river. And just in case that supports start to wane, the Obama administration has its bad cop -- the EPA -- at the ready.

-- Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on May 14, 2010 (boomark / email).