Green Elephant Line Media Backgrounder

Bundling Climate Change, Renewable Energy Legislation a Mistake

March 17, 2009

Democrat leaders in the House and Senate have indicated that they plan to bundle together climate cap-and-trade legislation and a renewable energy portfolio standard into one big bill.

Big mistake. Bundling the two proposals is a risky strategy that could result in the demise of both.

Climate change likely will be the heaviest environmental policy lift that Congress has ever attempted. A cap-and-trade system will have far-reaching impacts for decades to come, as it would reconfigure our energy economy away from its long dependence on carbon-rich fossil fuels.

The history of environmental lawmaking shows conclusively that it's necessary to build broad, bipartisan support in order to ensure that legislation succeeds in meeting its goals. The Clean Air Act is a good example.

Energy policy debates are fraught with partisan and regional differences. Putting together an energy bill is a bit like a chemistry experiment: the right ingredients in the right amounts must be put together, or else the process is likely to blow up. A climate bill will be an energy bill on steroids.

Adding a renewable energy portfolio standard to the mix would make writing a climate bill even more difficult. The portfolio standard would require electricity suppliers to source a minimum percentage of power from renewable resources. One of the regional issues in play is concern among Southeast lawmakers that their states lack the wind, solar, and geothermal resources that other parts of the country are endowed with, which they fear would lead to higher energy costs in the South.

In other words, adding a renewable energy standard to climate legislation would be a showstopper for Southern lawmakers who might be open to voting for a properly vetted cap-and-trade bill.

As Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, noted earlier this month, combining a renewable energy standard with a cap-and-trade bill "will make getting 60 votes on the floor an almost impossible lift."

A better approach would be separating the two issues and writing separate bills that can be vetted and considered on their own merits. A great deal is at stake that argues for this approach: climate change is a serious environmental risk, and diversifying our energy choices makes sense for many economic and national security reasons. Considering cap-and-trade and a renewable portfolio standard separately would improve the odds of building bipartisan coalitions to pass them separately.

Given the complex politics surrounding both proposals, combining them into one bill would create too large a risk that both would be defeated, wasting precious time in addressing serious energy issues.

Congress' Democrat leaders must ask themselves which is more important: scoring political points or passing necessary climate and energy policies that would strengthen our country and create new economic opportunities for all Americans.