Go nuclear!

Under our Constitution, Congress does not have the authority to force President Bush to reverse himself and accept the Kyoto Protocols. Thanks be to our founding fathers, because the Kyoto Protocols would have – among other bad things – effectively given regulatory authority over our electric power, industrial and transportation sectors to the Executive Board of the United Nation's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

But, stay alert.

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As difficult as it may be for you to believe, there is a very real danger that our own Congress – under intense pressure from constituents on both left and right – may impose upon us, legislatively, many of the bad things Kyoto would have done.

In particular, the Kyoto Protocols set limits on the amount of various so-called greenhouse gases that industrialized parties to the UNFCCC can annually emit. Greenhouse gases – as defined by the UNFCCC – include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) and sulfur dioxide (SO2).

For example, under the Kyoto Protocols, the U.S. would have had to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below what they were in 1990, by the year 2012. That would mean cutting our use of fossil fuels in 2012 back by about a third, which we could accomplish by shutting down every one of our power plants that burn fossil-fuels.

But, sometimes you have to wonder what the Kyoto Protocols are really all about. The operators of our fossil-fueled plants wouldn't have had to shut them all down. Like in some banana republic, you could have essentially bribed someone and kept on emitting carbon dioxide just as before. With a sufficiently large pay-off to someone, the Blue Meanies sent by the UNFCCC would have looked the other way.

You see, the UNFCCC will establish a system of entitlements – called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) – and if you own a fossil-fueled power plant, and you want to keep on operating, emitting tons and tons of carbon dioxide each year, all you have to do is to find someone who has been awarded enough CERs by the UNFCCC Executive Board to cancel out the excess carbon dioxide you emit. Once awarded, these CERs are intended to be traded on the open market, like warehouse receipts.

How will the E-Board decide how many emission-reduction credits – how many tons of carbon dioxide – to denominate the CERs?

Suppose some Johnny Appleseed-wannabe goes down and buys – as some are already doing – a few zillion acres of forest in the Amazon Basin. Those trees down south will soak up many tons of the carbon dioxide, presumably canceling out some carbon dioxide being emitted up north by your fossil-fueled power plants. Every year, for the next few decades, an agent for the E-Board will cut down one of those trees, and – after estimating from the width of tree rings how much growth there had been during some base year – estimate the relative growth of the tree in the year in question. Then the agent for the E-Board will estimate how much extra carbon dioxide the tree must have inhaled in order for it to have had that much extra growth.

Now all the agent for the E-Board has to do is to estimate the average number of trees per acre, multiply that by the amount of extra carbon dioxide he estimates each tree inhaled that year, and the E-Board has the CER credits – denominated in tons of carbon dioxide – to be awarded per acre of Amazon forest. The CERs are intended to be bought and sold on the open market.

You may have noted that the international system to be set up by UNFCCC for enforcing the reduction of emissions of all greenhouse-gases, looks very much like the system Congress has already established – with the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act – for enforcing the reduction of emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. Congress established total U.S. limits for sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions and directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allocate emission rights – consistent with the total U.S. emission limits – to the various operators of fossil-fuel plants.

Furthermore, Congress directed that EPA set up what has since been dubbed an emissions cap-and-trade system. If a power-plant operator needed to emit more sulfur dioxide than EPA allowed, he could – with EPA's blessing – buy the rights to emit more from someone else who had more rights to emit than he needed.

How could there be someone who had rights to emit more sulfur dioxide than he actually was emitting? Well, after EPA assigned him his cap, he may have switched from coal or oil to natural gas, which has little or no sulfur content, and hence, produces almost no sulfur dioxide when burned. After the switch, the plant operator will still have the emission rights already granted by EPA that he no longer needs. So, with EPA's blessing, he can sell them to the highest bidder on the open market.

How much are these EPA licenses-to-pollute worth? Well, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, the right to emit SO2 fetches on the open market about $200 per ton, and emission entitlements are denominated in 2500 tons increments. Last year, the total value of SO2 emission entitlements traded reportedly amounted to $670 million, and the value of the derivatives – futures contracts and options to buy or sell futures contracts – amounted to several times that. So, we already have a multi-billion-dollar-a-year cap-and-trade market for SO2 emission entitlements.

What ever motivated Congress to do such a thing? Well, did you ever hear of "acid rain"? Back in the 1970s, the eco-wackos – not yet having had their epiphany about global warming – ran around in circles of diminishing radii, muttering incoherently something about power plants in the Ohio Valley emitting clouds of sulfur dioxide which drifted east over New England and got turned by rain into sulfuric acid. Hence, the term "acid rain." The eco-wackos claimed that if you went around sticking litmus paper in New England lakes, then, more often than not, the litmus paper would turn from white (neutral) to pink (acidic) rather than to blue (basic).

Armed with all these pieces of pink litmus paper, the eco-wackos descended upon President Reagan and Congress, demanding that all the coal- and oil-fired power plants in the Ohio Valley be shut down. Or at least be fitted with stack-gas scrubbers to capture the sulfur oxide produced in burning coal and oil before it ever got released into the atmosphere.

Of course, if you're in the business of making and selling stack-gas scrubbers costing hundreds of millions of dollars apiece, you might think the eco-wackos are not so crazy at all. And if you're a regulated public utility, what do you care? You just add the cost of the stack-gas scrubber – mandated by Congress – to your rate base and the cost of scrubbing gets passed along by the rate commission to widows and orphans in the Ohio Valley.

President Reagan's view on acid rain was remarkably similar to that of President George W. Bush on global warming: Reagan doubted that anyone had showed conclusively that there was any cause-effect relationship between the operation of power plants in the Ohio valley and the color of litmus paper dipped in lakes in upstate New York. And even if such a cause-effect relationship could be shown, it was not obvious to Reagan that it was worth crippling the economy of the Midwest just so eco-wackos wouldn't have so much of their litmus paper turning pink. No one had actually documented any damage to the flora and fauna in the Northeast from acid rain and Reagan's call was no harm, no foul.

But, clearly, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide were pollutants and there ought to be some limits to their concentration in the air. So, Congress passed the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act, and the total amount of sulfur dioxide emitted has declined, mostly because of power-plant operators switching from coal and oil to natural gas.

Of course, you don't hear much about the color of eco-wacko litmus paper these days. But you did hear about the rolling blackouts in California last winter, didn't you? What do you suppose was a principal cause? Well it was a shortage of natural gas to burn in all those new power plants or in those that had been converted from burning coal and oil to natural gas, at least partially because of the Clean Air Act Amendments.

With the SO2 success now behind them, but having failed at Bonn last month to force President Bush to agree to the Kyoto Protocols, the eco-wackos are laying siege to our Congress, demanding that the U.S. unilaterally stop emitting carbon dioxide. Demanding that we not only shut down coal and oil fired plants, but also all those Clean Air Act plants that burn natural gas. They are demanding that – at a minimum – Congress require the EPA to set up a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide, similar to those already existing for capping the emissions of the pollutants sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide.

But, as President Bush made clear a few days after taking office, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and the EPA has no authority whatsoever to regulate its emission. Nor, he said, would he ever seek such authority.

So, Congress is under siege to do to us what President Bush, thus far, has prevented the United Nations from doing to us. And it isn't just the eco-wackos and the Appleseed-wannabes up there lobbying Congress. If the market in SO2 emission credits is already several billion per year, just imagine what the size of the CO2 emission credit market could be. Zillions of dollars changing hands every year. You can bet many Wall Street commodities traders are keeping one eye on C-SPAN and the other on C-SPAN2. And if the prospects of capturing a few million tons of sulfur per year had the makers of stack-gas scrubbers dancing in the aisles, just think of what the prospect of being paid to capture zillions of tons of carbon does to them.

Of course, if Congress really had in mind the best interests of American widows and orphans – if they had really cared about air quality – they would have seen to it back in 1990 that nuclear-power plants qualified for both sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emission reduction credits. And if – for some crazy reason – they now want to reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide to the point where the trees in the Amazon basin are gasping for breath, then the thing to do is to see to it that the owners and operators of new nuclear-power plants qualify for carbon dioxide emission-reduction credits, as well SO2 and N2O credits.

If Congress doesn't allow such credits for nuclear power plants – which emit no pollutants and emit no carbon dioxide or any other greenhouse gas – then President Bush should tell the American people that Congress is not really serious about clean air or global warming and he should then veto whatever bill Congress sends him to sign into law.

Congress probably won't allow Dubya to solve both the clean-air problem and the global-warming problem by going nuclear, but if they do, what cause will the eco-wackos take up next? Well, you're not going to believe this, but apparently the eco-wackos have discovered that there is – horrors – "city light" pollution at night near big cities. There, the stars at night are not as big and bright as they are (thump-thump-thump-thump) deep in the heart of Texas. And that'll never do.