GOP: Dems wrongly linking carbon caps, oil reliance after spill

Republicans are increasingly accusing Democrats of exploiting the BP oil spill to win traction for global warming legislation, but they maintain that leading climate plans would do little to wean the country off oil.

Senior Democrats including Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) say greenhouse gas curbs are vital to curbing dependence on oil. And they point to the BP oil spill to help make their case.

But GOP critics such as Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) have pushed back against efforts to link climate legislation to oil use and the spill.

“We need to stop the leak and focus on containing the damage,” said Matthew Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate environment committee.

Inhofe has added a new wrinkle to longstanding GOP claims that climate legislation amounts to a “national energy tax.”

Inhofe has pointed to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) studies showing that leading climate proposals would have little effect on the nation’s daily use of roughly 20 million barrels of oil.

The main House and Senate cap-and-trade bills would decrease oil use only by a few percent, if at all, in the next few decades, EPA found. The studies show a much greater effect on electricity generation, with renewable, non-carbon and low-carbon sources providing nearly all electricity by 2050, alongside declining use of traditional coal-fired power plants and increases in energy efficiency.

Dempsey, in a memo circulated to reporters in late June, flagged the analyses by EPA and the federal Energy Information Administration in attacking links between climate bills and oil consumption.

“Maybe President Obama didn't have time to read EPA's or EIA's analysis. He recently praised the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill because it ‘will strengthen our national security by beginning to break our dependence on foreign oil,’” Dempsey noted. “If by ‘beginning to break our dependence’ he means a slight reduction in oil use in 2050, we stand corrected.”

The battle is intensifying as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to bring a broad energy package to the floor this month aimed at toughening oil drilling safeguards, boosting “clean” energy sources and curbing reliance on oil.

Environmentalists and liberal Democrats want to keep greenhouse gas limits in the mix despite major hurdles to reaching 60 votes for cap-and-trade or other mechanisms to price carbon emissions. Legislation drafted by Kerry and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) would apply a carbon cap to a broad swath of the economy that includes power plants, big factories and motor fuels.

Kerry and Lieberman last month said it isn’t a time for “band aids” in calling for a broad climate change and energy bill.

“It is time to be for something, instead of standing by and doing nothing as our energy habits cost us money and increase our dependence on countries that don't like us,” they said after President Barack Obama’s mid-June speech calling for energy legislation this year.

Still, Kerry and Lieberman have offered to scale back their bill’s reach to make it more palatable to Republicans and centrist Democrats that oppose sweeping cap-and-trade plans.

One option in play would impose a cap-and-trade system on the electric power sector only. That would take caps on refiners and motor fuels made from oil off the table, but it would also weaken the link between climate legislation and oil reliance even further.

Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith said climate advocates are on solid footing when claiming that wide-ranging climate legislation is vital to curbing oil use and improving energy security.

Smith pointed to a recent study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, that shows the Kerry-Lieberman bill would reduce foreign oil imports by 33 to 40 percent. Smith said a major intention of the bill is “moving away from [oil] as a way to power the country."

The political battle draws from the wonkier side of the energy and climate wars: the distinctions between the types of energy used for electricity and transportation.

The U.S. generates electricity mainly with coal but also with sizable amounts of natural gas and nuclear energy, and a small but growing amount of renewable sources. Oil, on the other hand, is used primarily for transportation.

Climate and energy economists say that cap-and-trade would significantly cut emissions in the electricity sector because power companies will begin moving away from coal and begin trapping the carbon emissions from coal-based facilities.

Experts add, however, that alternatives to oil are scarce in the transportation sector right now, meaning oil use would be much less sensitive to carbon pricing.

"The oil spill may highlight need to reduce dependence on oil, just as climate change calls for us in general to reduce use of fossil fuels in general, but [the Kerry-Lieberman bill] isn't actually crafted to get to the oil part of our emissions," said Frank Ackerman, a climate economist at Tufts University. "It's primarily crafted to address the electricity part, because that part is easier and cheaper to get at."

As a result, the carbon price would likely need to be a lot higher than it is in Kerry-Lieberman to drop oil use significantly, but that might mean increasing gasoline prices by a few dollars per gallon, as is the case in Europe, Ackerman said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) helped Kerry and Lieberman craft their bill, but abandoned the effort several months ago and argues that emissions legislation can’t gain traction this year. He has more recently supported an energy bill crafted by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that aims to curb oil use but steers clear of emissions caps.

Graham agrees that carbon caps would do little to reduce oil dependence.

He sees policy options for reducing transportation-related emissions without caps, such as tougher fuel efficiency standards and investments in technology and battery power. But he maintains that pricing emissions is the way to incentivize the transition to cleaner energy sources.

"I don't think you can make wind, solar and nuclear deployable until you put a price on dirty coal," Graham told reporters recently.

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