The Greenie-leaning and -keening trade-press outlet Greenwire has a story today noting that three utilities gave a lot of money to lawmakers in the run-up to voting on the cap-and-trade energy tax: AEP, Duke Energy, and Southern Company. This is the third in a recent series proving very little about industry lobbying but a tad too much about Greenwire.
As noted here before, Greenwire writers either do not understand (or understand and desperately seek to spin) the dynamic whereby utilities are pushing this scheme — picking up where Enron left off — because cap-and-trade coerces taxpayers to pay utilities billions and billions more, much of which the utilities get to keep in return for their role as tax collector for the Green Welfare State. This was articulately admitted to by none other than AEP’s CEO, Mike Morris. Scribblers for Greenwire and its sister publications have sniffed to me that they read Planet Gore, so it seems rather odd that their tireless efforts to root out industry schemes hasn’t turned up this CEO’s efforts yet. Huh.
Reading today’s story, the message Greenwire doesn’t get (or sought to spin) was that the first two of those three utilities failed in their attempt to buy Republican support for the scheme. So instead the writer advances a fairly elaborate plan (elaborate plots and initiative aren’t exactly the hallmark of DC industry reps, but hey it fits the story line) which it turns out haunts the minds of green groups, whereby the utilities didn’t like what they thought the Democrats would pass, see, so if they could get the Republicans – plied with bags of utility PAC money to speak their lines properly – to yell “higher energy taxes!” a lot, they could get the Dems to support a watered down version that the utilities could live with.
The gaping hole in that story is that the Dems neither backed off their stringent Plan A nor compromised with the Republicans’ alternatives. Compromise with the GOP is demonstrable hooey, given how Waxman and Markey rammed this through committee largely as its authors would have it, rejecting each Republican overture to add rationality to it or merely suspend it should the economic damage it wrought become too great but managing. What little compromise ocurred is reflected in the hundreds of pages of sops to get enough Democrat votes on the floor.
As for backing off their stringent Plan A: the only walkback by Waxman-Markey was away from the president’s proposal, under which the state got all of the revenue from selling the energy stamps or ration coupons. Rent-seeking industries haggled with the Dems to wrest 85 percent of the revenue for the first decade as the price for their support. Something missing from this . . . oh, right, Republicans.
So, what we’re left with is that rent-seeking utilities failing to buy Republican support for their scheme under which the rent-seekers partner with the states to pick your pockets for no climatic impact (even if you accept all of the fevered assumptions) — which is precisely how Enron envisioned this scheme when they came up with this, as internal memoranda reveal. It’s good old fashioned nest-feathering. With a real plot like that, it’s bewildering the media have to make other ones up.