Jim is trying to take his company green.
The problem is, Americans consume too much energy to completely eliminate coal plants.
Some of the more hard line environmentalists want no nuclear energy and no new coal plants. However, nuclear energy does look like a necessary part of the solution to reducing emissions, and newer coal plants pollute substantially less than old ones.
So, Jim goes out and lobbies hard for a cap and trade plan.
And then, the plan doesn't exactly work how he wants it.
What especially enrages him, though, is how the government wants to spend the cash it raises from the allowances. As Lieberman-Warner worked its way through the Senate environment committee, senators attached assorted riders: $800 billion over the life of the bill for tax refunds to help consumers pay for their higher electric bills, $1 billion for deficit reduction and billions more in handouts to state governments. In industry speeches, Rogers characterized the bill as a “bastardization” of cap-and-trade economics. (He later apologized.) In conversations with me, he expressed special disdain for Barbara Boxer, the California senator who shepherded the bill through the Senate environment committee.
“Politicians have visions of sugarplums dancing in their head with all the money they can get from auctions,” Rogers told me last month. “It’s all about treating me as the tax collector and the government as the good guy. I’m the evil corporation that’s passing through the carbon tax so Senator Boxer can be the Santa Claus!” If the government was going to collect cash from carbon auctions, Rogers figured, at least it ought to invest that money in green-tech research. “A billion dollars for deficit reduction,” he vented. “A billion dollars! What is [Boxer] smoking? I thought we were solving carbon here.”
For all of Rogers’s careful effort to position himself as a forward thinker — and an advocate for the Midwestern coal states — that did not gain him any slack. Congressional insiders who watched Rogers lobby the Senate committee say that regional politics actually worked against him. The Democratic deal makers who promised to deliver the votes for the bill were “a left-center coalition” of senators, most of whom come from urban and coastal states that do not rely heavily on coal. (Boxer, for example, hails from California, which gets only a small percentage of its energy from coal.) “And a lot of people, Jim Rogers in particular, really didn’t play in the negotiations,” says a Congressional aide close to the Lieberman-Warner negotiations who did not have approval to talk to the press. “The members on the Democratic side aren’t particularly responsive to his concerns.”
It's a fascinating story of economic incentives to keep your company in operation, and economic incentives not to screw up the climate and flood half the world, including probably quite a bit of the US that is near the coast.
As Rogers went on the attack, critics countered that he sounded less like an environmental statesman and more like an old-school C.E.O. fighting for government pork, arguing baldly that what’s best for Duke is what’s best for the country — that cap-and-trade will only work if it’s set up in a way that best benefits Duke. John Rowe, the chief executive of Exelon — the country’s largest nuclear power company, which will profit handsomely by selling its allowances — argues that it’s only fair to hit Duke and others with higher costs. Customers in nuclear states have paid higher electric bills for years, because nuclear power is inherently more expensive to generate, Rowe points out. Duke could have switched to nuclear decades ago but didn’t, so now it must pay the price.
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