Folly of Waxman-Markey H.R. 2454

I subscribe to a monthly printed newsletter called The Energy Advocate. In the July 2009 issue publisher Howard Hayden quotes from the Waxman-Markey (H.R. 2454) "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009." This is part of his story about the tremendous strides that have been made in the last 20-30 years in reducing health-affecting air pollutants in the United States.

Because of EPA's attempt to classify CO2 as a pollutant and to regulate its emission, Hayden implies that Congress is on a fool's errand with H.R. 2454 because CO2 is a naturally occurring component of our atmosphere (0.04% by volume), essential for all plant life. He points out that the legislation may have an escape clause (see below).

The respected Christian Science Monitor also has a very recent editorial faulting other elements of the Markey-Waxman bill. My hope is the Senate will drastically modify it or let it lie. I have long maintained that cap-and-trade schemes on this scale are fraught with risk of manipulation, doomed for failure, and will dramatically increase the costs of energy and further repress our economy. If Congress thinks it must control carbon dioxide, a direct carbon tax on the end users is far more rational so that people will see it clearly, not camouflaged in high prices.

The act specifies that the Administrator of the EPA

"shall annually prepare and certify a report to the Congress regarding whether China and India have adopted greenhouse gas emissions standards at least as strict as those standards required under this Act. If the Administrator determines that China and India have not adopted greenhouse gas emissions at least as stringent as those set forth in this Act, the administrator shall notify each Member of Congress of his determination, and shall release his determination to the media."

He also makes the case that CO2 is not a pollutant (as proposed by the EPA).

"With the recent politically directed EPA finding that CO2is a pollutant, there seems to be a feeling among our lawmakers that a reduction in CO2 emissions can be accomplished by laws, regulations, and cap-and-trade schemes. Engineers will use some magic equations and magic substances like Unobtanium to accomplish the will of Waxman, Markey, Pelosi, and other starry-eyed true believers.

The chemical facts are these. Natural gas is primarily methane, CH4, which has four atoms of hydrogen for every carbon atom. Petroleum contains a great many compounds but all-in-all, the lot of them can be roughly represented by CH2; there are two atoms of hydrogen per atom of carbon. Coal is roughly CH, with one atom of hydrogen for each carbon atom. (We ignore contaminants here.)

When we burn any of these fuels, part of the energy comes from burning the carbon and part from burning the hydrogen. Necessarily we get H2O and CO2 as products of the combustion. It's not as if the carbon is some sort of contaminant in the fuel; it is part of the fuel. There is no such thing as low carbon natural gas, low carbon oil, or low carbon coal. Another way of saying it is that without carbon, coal, oil and natural gas would not exist. If I dwell on the obvious, it is precisely because Washington's climate controllers are unable to understand such subtleties."