Show me the deliberation...please!

After surfacing for some air in the last two weeks, the elusive energy bill has again disappeared into the murky depths of Senatorial politics. Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate has not become the deliberative institution it was designed to be. We see hearings on C-SPAN with lots of questions being asked, and a few being answered. We see flip charts and bar graphs and fancy posters being presented. We see Senators come to the floor with their aides (and sometimes with the help of their aides) to deliver policy speeches to an audience that consists mostly of administrative staff, security guards, pages, and sometimes even some lucky tourists. Real deliberation does not happen on the Senate floor, although bargaining might. And that usually happens when the C-SPAN mics are off.

The right for Senators to filibuster was designed so that debate could continue until a consensus was reached. Usually, now that does not mean debate and deliberation, that means deal-making, mutual back-scratching and overt bargaining. The filibuster is now used as a threat, rather than as an opportunity for substantive back-and-forth. Basically the filibuster now translates as: "I refuse to debate about this and there is nothing that can get me to change my mind." Once again, we can thank James Madison for the institutional incrementalism that pervades and can sometimes cripple American lawmaking.

I appreciate people having conviction about their principles, but why is it that flexibility, contingency and pragmatism are not considered principles worthy of conviction? Regardless of those structural flaws in the system, right now it's the only one we got.

After the Senate voted against cloture on the motion to agree to the House amendments last Friday, we have been seeing a very calculated game of political 'chicken.' The President all along has said he would veto any bill that singles out the oil industry and revokes substantial tax credits to big oil. But does he mean it? Probably yes. Despite the threat, Senate Democrats decided to push ahead with the bill, however, as many guessed would happen, the renewable energy standard was trimmed off to improve the bill's hopes of passage. At this point, it is unclear whether Democrats have the necessary 60 votes to prevent a filibuster and move forward with a vote on the bill.

My concern is that this is one of those instances where President Bush will show his 'conviction' by not passing any bill that repeals the billions of dollars to big oil subsidies. Maybe the President will surprise, in fact I hope he will surprise me. So I will hope that the President will show the rest of the world what a democracy in action looks like by passing the laws that a bicameral legislature has clearly determined as the will of the people. But the one thing that I have found about George W. Bush over the last 7 years is that he has lots of opportunities to surprise me, and hasn't done so once. With that said, I have carefully selected a few quotes that show the kind of real 'quality' communication that have emanated from our leadership in the last few days concerning the energy legislation.

It's a bill that's not going to become law. - Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX)

[The House passed a bill] they knew was unacceptable to the president and had no chance being signed into law. - White House Spokesperson Dana Perino

This is not a good bill, but it can be turned into a great bill. - Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM)

If it goes to the White House, we would hope that common sense would prevail and the president would sign that. – Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

I guess they're trying to guarantee a veto.” – Donald Stewart, spokesman for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

He is impossible, and has been for seven years, to deal with. – Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

Madisonian 'stability' in American gov't. still doing its job.

Like it or not, the spectre of James Madison still haunts the parliamentary reality of modern American politics. A case in point: the current legislative dance going on between the farm bill, the energy bill, rural senators, and (sub) urban representatives is slowing down lawmaking, and the effects of this delay could be enormous. This is nothing new, and unless there is some sort of constitutional overhaul, American government will continue to plod along incrementally. Not only is the system showing its stickiness but it is also showing its institutional overlap. The energy and farm bills are doing a little cannibalizing of each other. What are people saying about the farm and energy bills?:

"In this bill, we make it a priority to help farmers who are serious about getting into organic production, and we help them overcome the challenges of transitioning into this industry." --Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA)

"Most importantly, significant resources in [the Lieberman-Warner] bill must be explicitly allocated for Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Energy, the areas where we can get the greatest and quickest bang for our buck." -- Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT)

"I cannot think of an amendment more relevant to the economic security of the American farmer than an amendment to increase the renewable fuel standard" --Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM)

"...you may have an energy bill that doesn't really have incentives for renewable energy and high value energy efficiency – and that would be tragic." -- Scott Sklar, President of the Stella Group Ltd.

"What these gentlemen are trying to do is outsource our food and fiber" --Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AK) referring to the two sponsors of the $250,000 cap on farm subsidies.

"We elect Congress to move the country forward, not entrench the past, and we believe they will." --Michael Eckhardt, President ACORE

"I think we're looking at a December timeline for anything, the question is, what's going to be in it?" --Karl Gawell, Exec. Dir. of the Geothermal Energy Association.

"The time is slowly evaporating." --Sen Harry Reid (D-NV)

An Energy Bill in Farm Bill's Clothing?

If you have ever gone on a whale-watching trip, then you have an idea what it is like to try and follow the elusive politics of energy during this 110th Congress. If I may elaborate; every once in a while you can follow a whale as it swims along the surface just long enough to spout a burst of effluent and pose for a couple photos before it disappears into the darkness. But most of the time is spent waiting, not watching. Waiting and staring in the direction of where you last saw the whale, expecting it to resurface. The whale eventually resurfaces, but it is nowhere near where you were looking, perhaps even on the other side of the boat. You assume, correctly, that while underwater the whale must have been swimming. But it must have done so differently than you expected it to, for it to have ended up where and when it did. Before I beat this metaphor to death, let me just add that while it is hardly uncommon for deal-making and deliberating to occur behind closed doors, one can easily get caught off guard by only looking in one direction waiting for something to resurface.

Reports spinning in the blogosphere have indicated that renewable energy provisions are in danger of being removed from the energy bill by congressional leaders, who are willing to cede the bill’s better provisions in order to get it passed. All this is occurring while numerous energy issues have surfaced and are bubbling around the Senate Farm Bill.

This is where it gets a little tricky. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) wants to migrate two of his favored energy provisions -- the ethanol mandate and $50 billion in nuclear power loan guarantees -- into the more viable farm bill. Big-Ag has been lobbying heavily in support of the restructuring, but opponents fear that transferring the ethanol mandate to the farm bill would weaken bipartisan support for the energy bill and doom it to failure.

But also buried away in the farm bill is the often overlooked small wind tax credit. This year, identical bills were introduced in the Senate by Salazar (D-CO) and Smith (R-OR) and in the House by Blumenauer (D-OR) and Cole (R-OK) that would provide an investment tax credit of $1,500 per ½ kilowatt of capacity for small wind systems. This incentive could make small-scale wind energy generation viable for many, but it would not create the same kind of explosive growth in large-scale wind installations that an RPS or feed-in tariff would.

Late Tuesday, Blog for Rural America reported that the Senate Ag. Committee had agreed upon a list of amendments, and that debate on the farm bill should proceed in the morning. The first thing to be debated in the morning will most likely be the hotly contested Dorgan-Grassley amendment that would close loopholes for corporate farmers and put a 'hard cap' on farm subsidies at $250,000. Roughly half of the suggested $1.15 billion savings would be spent on social programs like emergency food assistance and food stamp enhancements. The rest of the money would be invested in programs for beginning farmer development, rural microenterprise assistance, farmers markets, organic certification cost share, community food grants, grasslands reserve, and farmland protection.

Not willing to give up hope for a more robust renewable energy program, Congressman Mark Udall (D-CO) has said that he will meet with Speaker Pelosi on Wednesday to talk about the future of the wavering energy bill. Co-chair of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, Udall is also meeting with senators to share his experiences with Colorado's successful Renewable Electricity Standard. Udall is positioning himself to run for the senate seat being vacated by Republican Wayne Allard, so he will do whatever he can to keep renewable energy targets in the energy bill – he could certainly use a legislative victory to earn some political capital to spend in the upcoming campaign.

"House energy bill, this is Senate energy bill. Say hello"

On a Saturday flurry that encroached one day into their summer vacation, the people's house passed an energy bill that should have put a smile on a few faces. For those who believe that we have not seen decent renewable energy incentives in the U.S. since the Carter administration, there is reason to feel somewhat victorious. But before you pop the cork on that bottle of Cold Duck or, as Fred Sanford liked to call it, "the good stuff," I must remind everyone that the Senate passed a different collection of energy bills, and now the two must be reconciled into a bill that President George W. Bush might just veto. That is, unless the most significant language in the bills is tempered rather considerably in an effort to get it past the White House.

The differences between the two bills are many. Some of the highlights include a solar energy tax incentive and the elimination of a multi-billion dollar tax break for big oil companies (coupled with a redistribution of those funds toward renewable energy research/production.). But the most significant piece of legislation in the Senate energy bill was completely omitted in the House version; the House did nothing in terms of raising automobile fuel efficiency standards. The Senate bill increases the requirement to 35 mpg by 2020 for cars, SUVs and small trucks, about a 40% increase. Simply put, the House dropped the ball, and the fact that they whimped out on CAFE standards is not particularly surprising.

Oddly, the part of the House legislation which had the most potential for inducing any sort of real change, was also the most yawn-inducing. The House bill energy mandates that investor-owned utilities purchase 15% of their power from renewable sources by 2020. Beside the point that this renewable portfolio standard (RPS) may get by fillibustered by senate Republicans, the language of it has considerable weaknesses.

I am not as optimistic as some that: a) The bill is an effective policy tool, and; b) The bill will even be passed by Congress. First, RPSs are a little clunky as a policy mechanism; they lack flexibility, and do not incentivize renewable energy prodcution the way European and Canadian mechanisms do. The EU, and parts of Canada have used renewable energy tariffs, feed laws, and fee schedules that mandate utilities to purchase renewable energy from any provider at a (fairly high) fixed rate; a rate high enough that makes buying solar panels and sticking them on your roof fiscally attractive. This very aggressive yet somewhat draconian provision has pushed Germany to the forefront of micro-scale renewable energy generation. Just last month, the German Ministry of Environment announced that the targets for 2020 had increased to 27% from the previous 20% and had added a target of 45% by 2030. If there is to be a substantial increase in renewable energy generation, this is perhaps the fastest way to achieve that goal--but politically it is unlikely.

The second shortcoming of the House RPS is that it is only for investor-owned utilities. The House RPS exempts rural electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the state of Hawaii from the mandate. Not surprisingly, the investor-owned utility lobbies were a little disappointed for being singled out in the house's legislation; Thomas Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, called the House vote “very disappointing.” (I bet you're disappointed, Thomas.)

The third reason I am disappointed with the house RPS is that several states have already enacted renewable energy standards that are considerably tougher than the federal mandate. The cartographic wizards over at the Pew Center on Climate Change have put together the handy little map below that shows the states which have enacted some sort of renewable standard. Doesn't it look strikingly similar to another map of the U.S. you saw last November? Well I have news for everyone, even that map is a little misleading. Can we break those units down a little more? Try this more detailed map from 2004 on for size! (to be continued...)