Carbon Pricing and Regulatory Uncertainty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Bloomberg writes today about the months-long effort by utility companies to get Congress to pass a climate bill that includes a cap-and-trade component. Industry lobbyist Ralph Izzo is discouraged:

“I don’t know what more you can do,” Izzo said. “We are essentially volunteering to be the first to be regulated and people don’t want to do it.”

….“The odds are still very long,” said David Brown, senior Vice President for Federal Government Affairs at the Chicago- based utility Exelon Corp., who estimates he’s held hundreds of meetings with senators and staff on the issue. “Everybody’s just exhausted.”

Utility companies anticipate Congress will eventually pass legislation that mandates reductions in greenhouse gases and favors renewable sources of energy, rather than letting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decide how best to regulate.

Still, not knowing when Congress will step in makes planning investment difficult. “There’s a lot of capital sitting on the sidelines just waiting for more regulatory clarity,” said Lewis Hay, CEO of Juno-Beach, Florida-Based NextEra Energy Resources LLC.

Italics mine. Conservatives keep complaining that the recession isn’t really the fault of weak demand, it’s the fault of businesses holding back on investment because of uncertainty over new regulations. This is about 90% bogus, but to the extent it’s true, one solution is simply to pass regulations that make the investment picture clearer. A cap-and-trade bill would have done that. But now that it’s been killed, no one knows what will happen next. Regulations from the EPA based on the Clean Air Act? A carbon tax sometime in the future? Or what?

You want regulatory certainty? Pass a cap-and-trade bill. This makes it clear what the primary regulatory tool will be; it makes it mostly clear what the future price of carbon emissions will be; and those who want even more clarity can largely hedge away the remaining uncertainty in the futures market if they want to. But now, none of that can be done. And the planet will continue to heat up. And we run the risk of the EPA being forced to make things worse by applying a badly-constructed law to the problem. Nice work, conservatives.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate