On June 26^th of 2009, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2454, or the so called American Clean Energy and Security Act, by a vote of 219 to 212. The bill is better known as cap-and-trade and while it passed the House, it never had the votes to pass the Senate and was thereby never brought to the floor.

H.R. 2454 is a train wreck of corporate welfare that ignores better alternatives and probably dedicates too much of our scarce resources to fighting climate change, but those are aside the point. The point here is that almost a year after the House passed cap-and-trade on April 20^th, the massive BP oil leak started. Fortunately, they just capped the leak, hopefully for good, after it had been gushing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. But the capped leak was and still is being used to push through cap-and-trade.

Just days after the spill started, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman (a Democrat, Republican and Independent from the government-worshipping party) announced plans to draft legislation at capping carbon dioxide emissions in the utilities and transport sector.  Nancy Pelosi released a memo stating, “The Gulf Coast catastrophe underscores the need for comprehensive energy and climate reform to rein in Big Oil and reduce our reliance on dirty and foreign fuels.”

Then on June 15^th, Obama addressed the nation about the spill. After describing the disaster and the administration’s response for a few minutes, he brought up the need to move to a “green energy economy.” As he put it:

Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industry that should be right here in America.  Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude. We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean-energy future is now.

It seems strange to me that he’s lauding China, which overtook the United States as the world’s biggest polluter in 2007, and that he’s complaining about how much of our wealth we spend buying oil from foreign countries while, apparently, not caring that we pay a similar amount in interest on the debt foreigners hold. But I digress, he continues:

The transition to green energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs. But only if we accelerate that transition and seize the moment… when I was a candidate for this office I laid out a set of principles that would move our country toward energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill. A bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s business.

That bill, of course, was H.R. 2454, or cap-and-trade. And of course, this seems extremely opportunistic and reminiscent of the manner in which George Bush passed the Patriot Act. It also seems like a non-sequitar. Sure oil spills and global warming are both environmental issues, but does an oil spill and a warming climate have anything do with each other?

The answer to that is obviously no. But to his credit, Obama does make some good points. He discusses the danger of peak oil and the problems caused by not being “energy independent.” And if we didn’t use oil, we wouldn’t drill for it and thus, we wouldn’t have the spill. Of course, the same argument could be made for coal after a mining accident, or nuclear power after Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, or just about anything else for that matter.

There are trade-offs and in the end we need energy to run a modern economy. As a matter of fact, Spain’s “green economy,” which Obama has repeatedly pointed to as an example to emulate, is in the middle of collapsing. (An in depth review from the Rey Juan Carlos University can be seen here, which concludes that implementing a Spain-like “green economy will cost 9 jobs for every 4 it creates.) Green energy is simply more expensive than what we have now. If it were cheaper, companies would already be using it. Barack Obama actually summed it up quite nicely:

But even with the costs, using the BP oil spill as a reason to pass cap-and-trade is even more dubious because BP supports cap-and-trade! “I profoundly believe that a cap-and-trade mechanism is the only way we will solve the emissions issue,” stated BP CEO Tony Hayward just a month before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Indeed, BP joined ConocoPhillips and Shell in supporting the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill discussed at the beginning of this article. BP was also a co-founder of U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) which lobbied for cap-and-trade (BP left in early 2010, saying it could lobby better on its own). BP even donated more money to Barack Obama, who promised to push for cap-and-trade during his campaign, than any other politician.

Why would huge oil companies—the companies Obama accused of “blocking” energy reform—support cap-and-trade with both their words and their money? The answer’s the same as healthcare reform; big businesses like to get in bed with big government.

Jim Snyder from The Hill points out that BP is promoting the use of natural gas, which produces significantly less carbon emissions than coal or oil. BP also just happens to have significant natural gas resources and, as Snyder puts it, “would likely stand to benefit from climate legislation that encouraged more gas use.” BP has also received federal subsidies for biofuels and solar energy (including a project located in Argentina). So BP is fully on board with Obama’s “green economy” and fully not on board with anything resembling laissez-faire.

But that’s not the way it’s spun. No, instead BP is an arm of the GOP and just wants to be left alone so it can drill in mile deep water without a backup blowout preventer. Well, BP likes that part of ‘being left alone’ (or at least liked it before a mountain of lawsuits starts heading its way), but it likes the subsidies and privileges Obama, and many past presidents, have been willing to throw its way. The BP oil spill has certainly been a monumental disaster, but it is not a reason to push through cap-and-trade. If anything, it’s a reason not to.

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