Common Ground?

There might be cause for unity among right and left wingers in opposing “Cap and Trade” legislation. If Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon is right, Democrats have replaced Republicans now as the people handing out “big sloppy wet kisses” to both Wall Street and polluters.

Here’s a brief interview from July 1st from the Thom Hartmann radio show.

HARTMANN: Congressman Peter DeFazio is with us. And you, along with Dennis Kucinich and a few others were among the few Democrats who actually voted against the cap and trade legislation in the House of Representatives. It’s not yet come up in the Senate. Congressman, why?

DEFAZIO: There were three progressives at least – me, Dennis, and Pete Stark of California, who understands financial markets, because we felt it’s not going to effectively deal with greenhouse gases, it’s loophole-ridden, it’s subject to massive manipulation (we already have some great quotes from people on Wall Street saying this is going to be the biggest market the world has ever had, much bigger than financial services.) They’re already creating, in Europe, carbon-offset futures derivatives.

HARTMANN:: This is the new bubble.

DEFAZIO:: Yeah – they’re going to create carbon offset derivative futures. They’re already talking about – the guy who’s head of Friends of the Earth got his economist somehow into a meeting of people on Wall Street – and they’re talking about traunching them into junk carbon and good carbon and gourmet carbon, so they’re going to traunch them, and then the bill says that if you are doing these exotic instruments on offsets, you have to buy insurance. That brings in the credit default swaps. So what it might do is get us our money back. Maybe AIG can go into the business of doing these as collateralized debt obligations and selling credit default swap insurance, and if we get the taxpayer money back real fast, before they collapse the next bubble, and if we don’t bail them out, maybe we won’t come out so bad. But this is really a bad way to deal with the issue.

HARTMANN:: So you’re of the opinion that a bad bill is worse than no bill. I’ve been taking the position that, and you’re causing me to rethink it, that a bad bill is better than no bill because at least a) the government’s acknowledging that we’ve got a carbon problem, and b) it’s making the right wing hysterical (I listened to part of Shaun Hannity’s show yesterday, and he spent half an hour – he calls it “cap and tax” – he’s hysterical about this, and c) once we’ve got that door open, maybe we can fix it. You think it’s just going to get worse?

DEFAZIO:: Well, I like to drive the right wing nuts, and that’s always part of the reason to do something or say something. But here’s the thing and most people miss this detail. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that the EPA can regulate carbon as emissions, greenhouse gases …

HARTMANN:: So we don’t need this bill.

DEFAZIO:Right. The Bush Administration refused to [inaudible], Obama earlier this year – the Obama EPA said we are going to begin the process to regulate greenhouse gases. This bill prohibits them from continuing that process.

HARTMANN:: Oh no.

DEFAZIO:: Yes. That is a specific provision in the bill that the polluters wanted. They said we don’t want the EPA going ahead with these rules and regulations like they did with clean water and clean air.

HARTMANN:: So this is not only a big sloppy wet kiss to AIG and Goldman Sachs, but also to the coal industry.

DEFAZIO:: Oh, it’s very coal-friendly. In fact, in the end it took away allowances for utilities that have a lot of renewable generation and, if they don’t have fossil fuels to spend them on, they’re taking their allowances and transferring them to the coal industry. That was a last minute Colin Peterson deal in the Ag section of the bill. I think it’s one of the most coal-friendly pieces of legislation since I’ve been in congress.

HARTMANN: : Amazing. …