I’m getting that from an article that purported to summarize some of the key components of the bill. I tried to actually read the bill, but the only version I could get to open was red-lined with all of the amendments and therefore nearly impossible to read.
Further, I wholeheartedly agree that this will not pass through the senate although I think that agriculture will be the primary impediment. That’s part of what makes this doubly frustrating for me; it seems like the administration is going out of their way to cram down a ridiculous bill that has no chance of passing.
I certainly agree that coal will get it’s way in the end, but if (and it’s a big if) the assertion that coal plants will be exempt from having to pay for their CO2 emissions is correct, then there is no reason for the coal industry to oppose the bill. Coal would remain the cheapest source of electricity, and in fact would become cheaper in comparison to the alternatives than it is now.
Anybody have a cite that supports CO2 permit giveaways for coal?
I think most people and also common language would say that C is being harmed less than A and B not that it is being promoted more than A and B.
You lost me with this part of your example although I’m sure I know what point you are trying to make. Perhaps you meant to make the current profits of D though F negative?
Regardless, I assume your point is that whatever fuel gains market share will have been promoted.
Semantics - in this cases I see “harmed less” as being equivalent to “promoting more”, because we’re not talking about the advertising sense of the word; we’re talking about pure dollars all around.
Meh, I wanted to make all of them “negative”. Originally I wrote those as costs, but then in my usual editing frenzy I changed “costs” to “costs/profits” and then moronically pushed just “profits” into the second sentence. (Wouldn’t be the first time I skewered my own point with a stupid error.)
And my point was actually that in a case where some industries get a bigger boost than others, they might need it more. Currently wind and solar and water power are pretty much in their infancy, with a great deal of development to be done with them before they really becomes competetive at pretty much any price. Nuclear, of course, is a heck of an effort to get going at all, independent of twiddles in cost. So my point was really, if the ‘promotion’ is simply enough to make natural gas competetive with coal, it will be about all the kick start it could ask for.
There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion about the “giveaways” of CO2 allowances. The issue isn’t the initial cost (regardless of whether the cost is zero or not). It’s that the number of allowances (and hence, the total allowable emissions) that are available will decrease over time. It is that reduction in allowances that will drive the market toward energy sources that emit less CO2, ideally in such a way that the total cost of those reductions is minimized.
If I recall correctly, the initial emission allowances for SO2 were also given away. That did not mean that those allowances were good in perpetuity - in fact, they were only good for one year. The number of allowances dropped over a period of several years, meaning that coal-fired generating units were required to reduce the total emissions by either purchasing allowances from someone else, by installing pollution controls, or by using lower-sulfur fuels.
This is the same for CO2 allowances. They have largely been given away for the first round, but they are good for only a limited period of time, after which all emitters subject to the program (including coal-fired utility plants) will have to either reduce emissions or buy allowances to meet their emission levels. I haven’t gone through the bill closely enough to see how the next round of allowances will be handled, but I think the process is such that an owner of year 1 allowances gets a certain percentage (say 98%) of allowances for year 2, and they will have to find ways to make up that 2% drop.
Whether the initial allowances were given away or sold is pretty much irrelevant in the long term (although I expect that an initial price would have resulted in quite a few emitters finding approaches to reduce emissions in year 1, rather than starting those reductions in year 2).
That explanation is quite helpful. Considering the success of SO2 emissions reduction, it sounds as though this scheme is workable.
Where could one look to find the proposed schedule for reductions? Would it be spelled out in the bill or would that be left up to the EPA after the fact?