Looking ahead: Debate on the Climate Security Act
Sometime in late May or early June, America's Climate Security Act (S. 2191) will be coming to the Senate floor. The bill, a Lieberman-Warner production, would, among other provisions, restrict imports from countries with significant greenhouse gas levels that do not have comparable climate-change policies.The bill is under heavy fire from the international trade community. U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab said, "We believe that this approach could be a blunt and imprecise instrument of fear - rather than one of persuasion - that will take us down a dangerous path and adversely affect U.S. manufacturers, farmers and consumers." Worries over how the bill might interact with our various treaty obligations abound.
And there is another worry: cost-effectiveness.
On March 14, the EPA released a 189-page study of the costs associated with S. 2191. As often happens in Washington, both proponents and opponents of the bill seized on the report as evidence of their position.
A major point is that the report made an eyebrow-raising assumption that power plants would be able to reduce emissions via long-term carbon sequestration – technology not yet available. It also assumed a 150 percent increase in nuclear power between 2005 and 2050. The last nuclear power, Watts Bar in TN, went online some 12 years ago and took 24 years to build. There are no plans to build any nuclear power plants in the U.S. anytime soon, for a variety of reasons, including operating costs and powerful NIMBY and anti-nuclear lobbying groups.
(In the interest of full disclosure: I grew up near Pilgrim Nuclear, which damaged fish populations by releasing gas-saturated water used to cool the reactors back into the harbor. That and the release of too-hot seawater caused changes in the fish population around the plant.)
The study estimates higher costs for electricity too. But are the estimates any good? The EPA estimated that the cost of electricity would skyrocket after they instituted acid rain policies 20 years ago. But the Clear Air Act Amendments of 1990 didn't turn out to be a price monster – according to the Environment Defense Fund, "cost estimates had ranged from $3-$25 billion per year. After the first 2 years of the program, the costs were around $0.8 billion per year. The long-term costs of the program are expected to be around $1.0-$1.4 billion per year, far below early projections."
Environmental advocates say that economic analyses like the acid rain study and the just-released one are fundamentally flawed because they cannot account for technological innovations driven by the increasing cost of releasing pollution into the atmosphere.
As a health policy person, I'd argue for the analysis to be thrown out simply for the following sentence: "The economic benefits of reducing emissions were not determined for this analysis."
What?!? How can we have an honest economic look at the benefits of reducing pollution and global warming if we don't take into account the health effects such as childhood asthma rates, respiratory infections, cardiovascular disease, malnutrition (from crop failure caused by drought or flood), loss of arable land, etc.
My directive to the EPA: Back to the drawing board. When you come up with an estimate that truly accounts for the cost to human lives, I'll start reading.
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