Coal Industry Pork Buys Chandler's Vote on Cap-and-Trade

Wonder why DINO extraordinaire and Blue Dog in good standing Ben Chandler voted for the "liberal" (EEEEEK!) Waxman-Markey climate change bill?

Maybe Media Czech's plea for voters to call Ben and demand he vote for the bill did the trick.

Maybe the Ghost of Climate Catastrophe Future visited Ben overnight.

Or maybe he voted yea because the coal-state Blue Dogs got billions in subsidies for mythical "clean coal" technology added to the bill.

Cap-and-trade was supposed to allow Congress to avoid picking winners and losers in the fight against climate change. Advocates claim that approach, which relies on the market to figure out the easiest way to reduce greenhouse emissions, is at the heart of the Waxman-Markey energy bill that the House is preparing to vote on Friday. But, among many, many other things, the 1,200-page bill would also devote $60 billion to making sure clean coal isn't a loser.

Given America's huge reliance on coal to produce electricity — and the breakneck deployment of dirty coal plants in China — proponents make a strong case that coal deserves special attention. The bill's cap-and-trade system won't produce a carbon price high enough to spur deployment of clean-coal technology for a very long time, they say. If clean-coal technology can be made more cost-effective, meanwhile, the know-how could be exported abroad. And, some admit, coal-state lawmakers wouldn't be comfortable with a cap-and-trade bill that didn't include a lot for coal.

Since cost-effective, large-scale clean-coal technology is still untested, the first thing the bill would do is allow a quasi-public corporation to tax electricity distributors $10 billion over 10 years to fund "demonstration projects." We can see the appeal of supporting basic research on how to make the black stuff greener, especially if it includes research on retrofitting plants.

But then comes the big-ticket stuff. The bill essentially guarantees that carbon capture and sequestration will play a large role in America's energy mix, at first by offering coal plants that capture and sequester most of their emissions 10 years of compensation that is many times the market value of the carbon emissions they avoid — on top of the savings they would accrue by not polluting under the cap-and-trade regime. After phase one, the Environmental Protection Agency would take more control. At that point, a complicated regulatory framework would aim to reduce the subsidy for new facilities so that it covered only capital and operating costs of carbon capture and storage for 10 years.

The editorial, published in the pathetic-rag-stupid-enough-to-fire-Dan-Froomkin, bases its criticism on an assumption that clean coal is a difficult and expensive, but nonetheless possible technology.

It's not. Clean coal is a myth. It doesn't exist, never has existed, never will exist. We'll see Mitch McConnell marry Barney Frank first.

These billions in "clean coal" subsidies are nothing but a monster give-away to the filthy, destructive, lethal industry that this blog will henceforth refer to as the magic buggy whip industry.