Inhofe Orchestrates Shameless Boycott Of Clean Energy Jobs Act
Inhofe Orchestrates Shameless Boycott Of Clean Energy Jobs Act
Our guest blogger is Josh Nelson, publisher of EnviroKnow.com.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, sponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for this week’s markup:
But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.
Late Friday, Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey announced “Republicans will be forced not to show up” at the markup hearing scheduled for Tuesday. Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:
– As Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) shepherded his American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) through the House Energy and Commerce Committee this June, committee ranking member Joe Barton (R-TX) employed multiple parliamentary tricks to “nitpick the bill into legislative oblivion.” Democrats responded to these “nefarious stall tactics” by calling Barton’s bluff, even hiring a speed reader.
– House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) filibustered the final vote on the ACES Act for hours by reading the text of the bill on the House floor.
– Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.
While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:
– Despite the fact that Senator Inhofe has been working to orchestrate this obstruction for a week now, Republicans are pretending the effort is being led by the two moderate Republicans on the committee. Politico handled the stenography, writing that the “boycott effort is being led by the two most moderate Republican members on the committee: Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.” This is absolutely not true. Voinovich and Alexander have both indicated a willingness to lend bipartisan support to the legislation. Their statements in support of Inhofe’s obstruction are an indication that they are showing deference to the ranking member on the committee, nothing more. Again, this thing has Inhofe written all over it.
– Senator Inhofe, of course, will never support the bill regardless of any economic modeling the EPA does. He does not even believe that humans are responsible for climate change. In his opposition to health care legislation he was at least honest enough to say so up front, telling a town hall in August, “I don’t have to read it, or know what’s in it. I’m going to oppose it anyways.” The same is true of the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill: Inhofe has no intention of learning anything about it or voting for it. His only intention is to gum up the works and delay delay delay.
– As Senator Boxer has pointed out, Inhofe’s stated reason for concern here is absurd. The two-week EPA analysis of Kerry-Boxer came on top of the five-week review of the House-passed bill — and the two bills are “90 percent similar,” says Boxer. “We’re not going to waste taxpayer money because someone drew a line in the sand.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has called Inhofe’s gambit exactly what it is: “theatrics.”
This is nothing more than a shameless attempt to obstruct and delay clean energy legislation. Both on the EPW Committee, and in the full Senate, the numbers are on the side of passage. Senator Inhofe knows this, so he is throwing one last hail-mary in an attempt to stall the process. I don’t expect better from him, but it is still pretty pathetic.
10 Responses to “Inhofe Orchestrates Shameless Boycott Of Clean Energy Jobs Act”
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The Committee may not be able to mark-up the bill, but can it repoert it back to the floor as is for passage and let the differences be sorted out in a conference committee since the two bills are 90% similar?
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 amI think we need to stress that this obstructionism is keeping people from getting a job and Inhofe is the one making sure that Americans are denied a good paying job.
Tie good paying jobs going down the toliet to James Inhofe.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 amI expected Voinovich to be more independent, considering he is retiring next year. What a senile wuss.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:45 pmThat is more reason to just forget Congress on climate. There’s an endangerment finding, so let the EPA lead. The Boxer-Kerry bill is the worst kind of absurd time wasting.
Anyone who thinks cap-and-trade is better than a direct, floating subsidy of wind power should be required to foot the bill for the differential in flood insurance rates, flood clean-up costs, the other differential expenses (e.g., fire, drought, agriculture) associated and the resulting change in government revenue.
It continually amazes me that CAP can’t seem to find climate bloggers who care about minimizing losses instead of incrementalist cap-and-trade partial auction bullshit.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pmjps: What’s your evidence that a direct, floating subsidy of wind power would lead to a global reduction in carbon emissions?
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:06 pmBrad, in the November 2009 Scientific American the cover story by Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford’s director of their Atmosphere/Energy program, and Mark A. Delucchi from UC Davis, is about transitioning all the world’s power to wind, water, and solar by 2030. The U.S. alone could do it in less than half that time if we followed their plan.
On page 65 they discuss subsidies and carbon taxes (which by themselves would slow the economy) and a feed-in tariff program which would “cover the difference between generation cost and wholesale electricity prices” — effectively a subsidy which floats to put market forces behind renewables even if and when fossil becomes cheaper — which they say is “especially effective at scaling-up new technologies,” citing results in U.S. states and Germany. They also mention declining clock auctions (of which I’m skeptical, but about which I need to learn more.)
I know a lot of people think cap-and-trade can be effective, but the Kerry-Boxer bill contemplates auctioning a tiny percentage of permits — 15% if I remember correctly — and nobody seriously thinks that would do much of anything consequential, besides make Kerry and Boxer feel good for all the wrong reasons, I suppose. And what about the goals for the bill as stated by Kerry and Boxer, to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020″ — what more do you need to prove that the whole mess is a monumental waste of time? It’s probably worse if it gets enacted than doing nothing, because it will dampen subsequent progress.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:09 pmWhat a surprise, more republicans trying to screw everything up for the US. I think perhaps they know they are a dying breed and are trying to go out with a bang, everything else doesn’t matter such as dignity etc.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:18 amExcellent, way to go Inhofe! Keep up the good work!
When Barbara Boxer went on CNN to state that people should leave Gary Condit alone in the Chandra Levy case I lost the tiny smattering of respect I possibly might have held for her as a human being.
Barbara Boxer is a vile human being for defending someone who might at that time known something about Levy’s disappearance.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:08 pmI’m not happy about Boxer and Kerry’s attempt at “bipartisan” kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry lunatic fringe. She should be courting the conservationists who want to conserve flood plains, agriculture, and spending on the massive and expensive damages unchecked global warming is causing. But she’s still 10,000 times better than Carly Fiorina, who destroyed most of the engineering research programs at Bell Labs and HP in a slash-headcount-for-quarterly-numbers scheme. A lot of the Republicans secretly believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, so they have no trouble with slashing science, technology, engineering, and math headcount.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:26 pmIf the sustainable energy policy works against employment, EU should be suffering from the highest jobless rate by now, but the reality is the other way round.
Thankfully and interestingly enough, 100s of Companies (with $13 Trillion) Are Demanding Strong Climate Deal in Copenhagen just like environmental activists, and a coalition of more than 500 Global Businesses is also demanding ambitious new climate deal.
November 4th, 2009 at 6:38 am