What DC can teach California – and Vice Versa – About Putting Together a Climate Bill

It’s been a hard couple of weeks for those who deny the existence of climate change.  As storms rage on the East Coast, cutting out power to hundreds of thousands of consumers, and as wildfires threaten huge swaths of the Western states, new evidence has emerged that sea levels are steadily rising and will continue to – albeit more slowly— even if we take strong action to cut emissions.  

With these facts at hand, it seems like folly to continue denying that the planet is warming and that we need to do something about it. You’d think the country would be running, not walking, toward a smart energy strategy—a new course that diversifies our energy base, reducing the impact of blackouts, and produces energy with far fewer carbon emissions so we’d at least begin to address the long-term impacts of climate change.

Unfortunately, as I wrote in my last blog post, many of our national politicians have yet to hear the call to action, even as their D.C.-area homes are battered by heat waves and thunderstorms. 

But the fact that Congress is reluctant to curb climate change today doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from Washington when it comes to smart energy policy. Three years ago, Congress did move forward with an historic bill to cap carbon emissions, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES. 

Those of you who follow the ins and outs of energy legislation know that ACES, which passed the House in an historic vote on June 26, 2009, failed to get traction in the Senate, and we haven’t seen an alternative climate bill in Congress since.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons to be learned from the work that led to the final House vote.

Now that California is moving forward to implement its own historic climate bill, known as AB32, it’s the perfect time to look back to the lessons learned in 2009 and see how those might play out in California.  Of particular importance in California is the question of how to spend the anticipated revenue from the program, which will be anywhere from $660 million to more than $3 billion in the 2012-13 budget cycle alone. For guidance, we need some idea of how the federal bill allocated revenues to different sectors of the economy, including consumers, carbon-intensive industries, and innovators. 

With this in mind, I went to DC last week to meet privately with some of the critical negotiators on ACES from the political, advocacy, and business worlds.  I wanted to get a sense of how those negotiations played out – what alliances were made, what surprised the negotiators, and what lessons could be gleaned for our work implementing AB32.  

Read the full article on the Huffington Post »