http://ift.tt/1Qq2HqV
It's sad that to get a no-brainer like allowing oil exports in, the Republicans had to agree to continuing the Democrats' favorite corporate welfare programs, but sometimes you have to compromise.
Bill McKibben is not happy.
"Math [...] is the foe here." OK then.
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Lawmakers have agreed to lift the four-decade-old ban on crude oil exports as part of a spending and tax package announced by congressional leadership on Tuesday night, according to a GOP lawmaker. In exchange, Republicans agreed to extend a series of expired or expiring renewable energy tax breaks. Both the wind production tax credit and the solar investment tax credit won five-year extensions in the tax and spending package unveiled on Tuesday, the GOP lawmaker said. Lifting the crude oil ban was a key goal for Republicans, who have said American oil producers should have expanded access to the international market at a time of low prices and new competition from Iranian oil. Democrats have long proposed trading the renewable energy credits for crude oil exports, though until recently there was little movement on getting an exports-tax credit package to the Senate floor. But Republicans were aggressive in pushing to including the crude oil bill in the end-of-the-year tax overhaul and spending bills. Democrats worked to tie exports to renewables in the package, with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) saying Tuesday morning that Republicans were weighing a Democratic offer to accept either both provisions or neither of them. |
Bill McKibben is not happy.
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There should be a word for this kind of simultaneous hypocrisy. One study shows that the effect of lifting the export ban is the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 108 million new cars, or 135 coal-fired power plants. So doing it the week after the solemn and pious talk about saving the planet is not like some parent who smoked dope in the ‘70s warning their daughter about drugs—it’s like a parent who is currently high warning their daughter about drugs. You might as well hold the launch party for your vegetarian cookbook at a steakhouse. Lifting the export ban is bad policy in a dozen other ways: it makes a mockery of our repeated paeans to ‘energy independence,’ and it will cost union jobs at refineries, and it will cover yet more of our nation with oil rigs, and it will increase the danger from oil trains rolling through poor neighborhoods. But what makes the plan to lift the ban especially galling is that the administration and congressional Democrats insist they’re getting a reasonable deal because the Republicans will concede tax breaks for solar and wind producers in return. But the logic of the Paris accords—with their theoretical commitment to a world that will warm just 1.5 or two degrees—means that we don’t get to keep making this kind of tradeoff. Yes, we have to promote clean energy. (And the polling data shows we can do that if we make a stand—even Republicans, by large margins, love solar energy). But we also have to stop the expansion of fossil fuel. If you just say ‘we’re going to do both’ then there’s no way to make the climate math work. And math, ultimately, is the foe here. |
Proposed spending deal would lift oil export ban, extend solar/wind tax credits