A “clean” bill on carbon tech won’t stay clean for long.
Michael T. Burr is Fortnightly’s editor-in-chief. Email him at burr@pur.com.
An interesting development in the climate change debate occurred this summer in the U.S. Congress. It wasn’t the Senate’s work on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act; that was a complete palaver and an embarrassment for American democracy. No, it was a bill quietly introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chairman of the House Energy & Air Quality Subcommittee.
On June 12, Boucher introduced the Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Act, with support from a bipartisan group of legislators in coal-dependent states, as well as industry companies and organizations. The Boucher bill would create an industry-funded and industry-managed organization to finance development and deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. It would follow the model of the Propane Education and Research Council, which former Massachusetts Environmental Secretary John Bewick discussed in a recent Fortnightly feature story (“Cultivating Clean Tech,” May 2008).