A Too-Dirty Clean Air Plan

When politicians begin talking about global warming, they often emit hot air. Their rhetoric sounds tailored by pollsters to appeal to “green” voters without getting specific about economic sacrifices. Such talk won’t be enough as the Senate responds to a global warming plan that President Bush unveiled last week. Its challenge will be to protect a slackened economy while repairing dangerous loopholes in the Bush plan that would lift regulations in the short term, allowing huge increases in pollutants that cause smog and acid rain.

The heart of the president’s “Clear Skies” and “Global Climate Change” initiatives is an emissions trading program that would establish pollution reduction targets, then let dirtier plants buy credits from ones that have lower emissions. Bush would offer small but useful incentives: $4.6 billion in tax credits over five years to encourage utilities to build clean generators like windmills, and homeowners to buy solar panels or efficient cars.

Some environmentalists argue that it’s immoral to buy the right to pollute, but emissions trading has a well-documented record of success. As the president accurately pointed out, the national trading program for sulfur dioxide pollution “has reduced more air pollution in the last decade than all other programs under the 1990 Clean Air Act combined, and by even more than the law required.”

While emissions trading is one of several useful proposals outlined by the president, his initiatives have three glaring flaws that Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), who is to begin hearings on the plan this week, should fix:

* Lax standards. Bush’s Clean Skies standards wouldn’t even start phasing in until 2008, and in the meantime his plan would weaken the Clean Air Act to allow massive new increases in air pollution--a 36% increase in smog-producing pollutants, a 50% increase in the pollution that causes acid rain and a 73% increase in toxic mercury emissions.

* Lack of oversight. Bush’s emissions trading plan relies on companies to report their own reductions but has no mechanisms to ensure accuracy and honesty.

* Stingy research and development. In his speech, Bush said “the world needs to develop and deploy billions of dollars of technologies that generate energy in cleaner ways.” But his fiscal 2003 budget actually calls for a $52-million cut in federal R&D; on energy efficiency.

Bush is not the knee-jerk opponent of the environment that his foes paint him to be. He’s unfairly criticized for rejecting the Kyoto global warming treaty last year, which required the U.S. to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012. As Bush points out, since U.S. emissions are now about 14% over 1990 levels, compliance with the treaty would be prohibitively expensive.

Still, Bush’s alternative to Kyoto is far too lax. If Congress rubber-stamps it, the plan could let emissions levels in 2020 be 43% higher than 1990 levels. No amount of rhetorical hot air can make that look like progress.