Is the Renewable Electricity Requirement is dead to this bill?

The 15% requirement for wind and solar is now dead.  But how nice of 'em to leave the RFS so we get all the benefit of that corn-ethanol.

Oh look, they just a passed a bill to replace all the coal in the christmas stockings with corn instead!  Whoopie!  Now they can use the coal to power new energy plants!  

I'm sure Santa will just love his toxic glass of milk that they left for him.

The resulting bill is, in my humble opinion, no longer a net positive, but I know plenty of people disagree with that in good faith.

No, I totally agree. And some of us, figuring that Gresham's Law of Policymaking -- that bad policies would push out any good ones -- would prevail, expected no better.

What I am surprised at is John Bailo's positive response. John: are you actually pleased to see a greatly expanded RFS?

"reduce our nation's consumption of gasoline by 20 percent in 10 years"

After the state of the union speech in which the "20 in 10" plan was announced, I remember hearing that it was not 20% below 2007 consumption levels, but 20% below the projected 2017 levels.  Is this correct?  I dug around whitehouse.gov and doe.gov for the answer but could not find anything describing the baseline in the "20 in 10" plan.  Anybody know of a document that pinpoints the baseline?  

I have a suggestion to the editors of Grist. After much sound and fury on the just passed energy bill, of the sort that causes people who normally agree to quit talking to one another, it is time to step back and do an assessment. Some questions I would like to hear answered follow.

(1) Just where the hell are we right now in budging the beltway monolith on global warming, a new energy regime, etc?

(2) What does the history of this campaign tell us about the political effectiveness of American environmentalists.  

(3) What does this history tell us about what we should expect from a Democratic Congress and/or administration should that great getting up morning come about in 2008. Where do our hopes have some basis in reality and where are they just hopes.

(4) What does this history tell us about the Republican Party in the future. Are they still brain dead on the environment? Or are they merely the corporate whores they have always been.

(5) Lets talk about the divisions in the environmental movement as exposed by this campaign - Big Greens vs Little Greens, The Beltway Crowd vs the greens of the hinterlands.

December is always the month when news programs do an end of the year assessment.  I think Grist should do the same. It has plenty of bright people in its community, could be easily doable, and would be a great service to Grist readers.

Randy Cunningham

Randy Cunningham

Under the radar throughout the big headlines (oil & gas, CAFE, RES) has been the industrial energy provisions that are, in my opinion the most transformative elements of the bill.  These provide $10/MWh payments to any project that is over 60% efficient (not quite an RPS, but no small potatoes either), but more substantively, direct the states (to the extent we can in a federalist system) to amend their laws such that those power plants that pass the test can sell their excess power at a fair price, either by (a) compelling the utilities to buy power back at the all-in retail rate, less their profit margin (this would essentially expand net metering to cover all clean technologies, rather than just the lucky few small ones that utilities have previously accepted to greenwash themselves), or (b) amending their criminal code to remove the current provisions that make it a felony offense to run a private wire across a public thoroughfare.  Cut through th jargon and that means that you could now simply negotiate a deal with your neighbor to sell power rather than have to continue to presume that the local utility has a monopoly on distribution (and pricing thereof).  These are hugely transformative, in a redefine-the-rules kind of way, but don't get nearly as much of attention as the other bits that have more dollars at stake.  My prediction is that in the long run, this will be the most significant part of the bill.

So yeah, we didn't get everything, but we got the really important part, at least on the power side.

That does sound like good news, Sean. But would it not have been worth waiting just a little bit longer to get if there were a chance of cleaning up the bad parts of the bill first?

Well, yeah... but that option wasn't on the table.  There were three key parts of this bill on the electric side: the IE section, the RES and the tax provisions.  All three passed the house.  The second two were funded, in part by the oil & gas tax rollbacks and thus triggered the president's threatened veto (not to mention the more paleolithic members of the Republican party).  Reid first tried to break this logjam by taking out the RES, which got him from 57 votes to 59 - still not enough to break a filibuster.  So he also stripped out the tax section, which all of a sudden allowed us to keep in much of the oil & gas money (trust me, they really need more money).  

As Bismarck's old line goes about politics and sausage making, if you like the product, don't watch the process.  But the process is what it is, and there was a never a political moment here where you could trade off or get one for the other.  This was a larger question of how much you can get.  And from the get go, my feeling has been that those IE sections are the most transformative from a policy level, and therefore the most important to keep in (after all, you can always repeal a tax credit or an explicit subsidy, but it's really hard to undue a policy... as 100 years of idiotic electric policy will attest).  The Ds, to their credit pushed for a lot, and they didn't get everything.  One could argue that had they pushed a little harder or played the politics a little savvier, they could have gotten more, but that's Monday morning quarterbacking.  The relevant question at this point is not "did we get everything we hoped for?", but rather "did they get something positive"?  And - unlike the 2002 energy bill, when the answer to that question was a resounding no - I'd say we did.

And for what it's worth, discussions are afoot right now about how the RES can be added into some other bill later, as well as the tax package.  (Recall that without the tax package the production tax credits for wind, solar and geothermal all expire pretty soon, so there is a lot of pressure for Congress to do something.  So even though they couldn't get it done in this bill - a challenge with all big omnibus bills, which our energy bills invariably are - the signs are that they will figure a way to roll this into something else.)

Politics & sausage, politics and sausage.

I'd also reiterate a comment a friend and long-time DC insider told me about Washington: "It's not over until the loser says it's over".  There's a lot of work required to convert a bill into legislative language, get that language "scored", get the politics understood, build alliances, etc. - all of which comes before the vote.  That effort means that ideas which lose one vote are more well positioned to roll into future bills or amendments than other ideas that haven't gone through that process.  And so long as past "losers" are still pushing to get them in, they're still in play.

So I'd take this latest effort as a sign that lot of small battles were won, and - but for one senate cloture vote - we damn near won the war.  But we've still got our troops & munitions, and we're well positioned for the next go round once the next political cycle starts.

Remember the old "How A Bill Becomes A Law" cartoon, with the danicing bill?

A new one needs to be made to commemorate the latest version of lawmaking, with lobbyists writing them, lawmakers never reading them, and then being payed ("contributed") to vote for them.

Then reps retire to become "consultants" for industry.  Not lobbyists, for 2 years at least (thanks to the new "law" on lobbying), only consultants.  Wheeew, nice to see that corruption cleaned up!

Then there is the little matter of separation of powers (do we even have a supreme court anymore? Seems this might be unconstitutional), that has been canceled with the prez use of signing statements.  He picks and chooses which parts of any law his government will abide by.

Making the executive branch the majority "decider" in legislative issues.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Maybe they can roll the wind and solar into the Farm Bill?  Ya know, solar farms, wind farms.  It actually is potentially a good use of farmland that might be underperforming.

Save a farm...put up a windmill!

www.NoPunProductions.com ~ AmericaTheGreen.org

...and then, the animated bill bends over...well, you get the point.

"I'm just a bill. I'm only a bill, and I'm bending over capital hill."

www.NoPunProductions.com ~ AmericaTheGreen.org

Yep, I hear it now!

 I wrote a post on an ideal farm bill that turns farms into energy farms and organic carbon sinks.  The clean wind, solar, and biogas kwh pay for an upgrade to robotic organic farming.

Pay your local organic farmer for "gas" (KWH) to fuel your plugin car on green electricity, Istead of paying at the gas pump to exxonmob and bushco/saudi  contractor friendlies.

Cut the warmongering feudal corporatist class out of the energy cash loop.  Give the cash flow to green power companies all over the country.  They only need 60 cents for the electricty equivalent to a gallon of gas in mileage.  And it will save the family farm/small business economy.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog