Slate: Will the New Climate Bill Damage U.S. Energy Security?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.slate.com/id/2257021

Slate runs the numbers on one of the skeptics' favorite arguments.
By Michael A. Levi and Trevor HouserPosted Tuesday, June 15, 2010, at 10:51 AM ET


A representative from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce confronts an activist prankster


Few groups have been more strident in their opposition to cap-and-trade legislation than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Last year, four prominent members of the powerful business lobby, including Exelon Corp. and Pacific Gas & Electric, quit on account of its obstructionist approach to climate policy. When some activists announced, in a prank press conference, that the chamber would throw its weight behind an ambitious climate bill, the group responded with a lawsuit.

In arguing against cap-and-trade, the chamber has repeatedly advanced the notion that such legislation would harm U.S. energy security in some fashion or another. So last month, when the chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy announced that it had created a comprehensive new index of "Energy Security Risk"—a tool designed "to track shifts in U.S. energy security over time and assess potential impacts of new policies"—we wondered whether its calculations might be applied to the most recent energy and climate change policy proposals. In other words, what would the chamber's own definition of energy security say about the cap-and-trade bills the group so consistently opposes?

To find out, we ran the numbers on the clean energy and climate change bill unveiled by Sens. Kerry and Lieberman last month. We found that, according to the chamber's own definition of energy security risk, the bill would help America, nearly across the board.

Energy security is notoriously difficult to define and thus serves as the perfect weapon for attacking legislation: Just pick a bill, find a random but scary-looking detail (higher electricity prices!), and then claim that it will put the homeland in danger. This is an established tool in the chamber's arsenal. The group's Web site declares that it "will work to discourage ill-conceived climate change policies and measures that could severely damage the security and economy of the United States."

Now the chamber's new "Index of U.S. Energy Security Risk" assigns some firm numbers to a slippery concept. It combines 37 factors that measure how our energy use affects the economy and national security. For example, one determines the security of global oil supplies by looking (in part) at whether oil is being produced in countries with free or repressive governments; another measures how much energy the United States uses to produce a dollar of GDP; a third evaluates the diversity of the U.S. power plant fleet, since greater variety tends to make us more resilient to unexpected events.

FULL 2 page story at link.