Does the Kerry-Boxer climate bill adequately protect low- and middle-income households from rising energy prices? During today's OnPoint, Jason Walsh, national policy director at Green for All, a founding member of the Climate Equity Alliance, discusses the consumer protection provisions of the bill and explains how the distribution of allowances will affect consumers.

Transcript

Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to the show. I'm Monica Trauzzi. Joining me today is Jason Walsh, national policy director at Green For All, which is a founding member of the Climate Equity Alliance. Jason, thanks for coming on the show.

Jason Walsh: Thanks for having me.

Monica Trauzzi: Jason, on the heels of last week's release of the Kerry-Boxer climate bill there's a lot of talk about consumer protection measures in the bill and the Climate Equity Alliance is heavily involved in the discussion on how to protect low income consumers from the impacts of a cap and trade. How exactly is the Climate Equity Alliance involved in the debate?

Jason Walsh: The Climate Equity Alliance is a broad convening of organizations, faith-based civil rights, labor, research and advocacy working to make sure that climate policy effectively addresses the needs of low and moderate income households and workers and communities. As an alliance we not only approach climate policy as profoundly important environmental policy we also approach it as economic policy, in some ways the most important economic policy of our time that, if we do it right, allows us to advance core American values of opportunity and fairness and equal access. We also think it matters that organizations that have a lot of expertise and credibility in developing and talking about economic policy, like the Center on Budget Policy Priorities, the Center for American Progress, NAACP, many organizations that those who think of climate policy only as environmental policy don't expect to see in this debate, have a very strong role in it. The Climate Equity Alliance has a set of policy priorities and principles, which, for the sake of time, I'll boil down to two. Number one, we want to maximize the gain for low-income communities in this legislation by making investments in industries like energy efficiency and manufacturing that have huge job creation potential and which are accessible to low income workers as long as the legislation also provides the right training and supports and connections to unions and employers. So, we're also, I think, delivering a pretty clear message, at least I hope we are, that if we let global warming continue unabated it will be low-income folks who are hit first and worst, not just in Bangladesh, but here in United States. Low-income people are the least able to afford the economic dislocations that come from climate change. They are least able to get out of harm's way from extreme weather that accompanies climate change and, of course, low-income communities and communities of color are often at the smokestack end of the dirty energy in our current economy and they suffer disproportionately from asthma and cancer as a result. So, not only is the status quo unsustainable for the people and the planet generally, it's particularly unsustainable for low income communities.

Monica Trauzzi: So, as it stands now with very little direction on the allocation of allowances, what are your thoughts on how the bill handles investments for low-income families?

Jason Walsh: Right. Kerry-Boxer does two essential things. Number one, it provides a badly needed kick start to our current economy and it lays the foundation for a clean energy economy into the future, while at the same time including provisions that will make sure the promise of that clean energy economy works for the workers in communities that have been hit hardest in our current economy. And number two, it includes pretty bold targets, particularly in the short term that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a manner that we think is aggressive and timely enough to avert the worst economic and environmental consequences of global warming. Now, as an organization and as an alliance that is dedicated to advancing broad opportunity as we make this transition to a clean economy we hope it starts a necessary conversation about how we can both address climate change while also making sure that we're maximizing opportunity for low-income folks and making sure they get protected as well.

Monica Trauzzi: Does it go far enough up the income scale in terms of the different types of people that will benefit? I mean will middle income households also see a benefit? Do they need to go further with that?

Jason Walsh: Well, yeah, they do. There's a lot we don't know at this point. The bill acknowledges the need to protect low and moderate income households who pay a disproportionate percentage of their income on energy costs, from the impact of increased energy costs that will come when we put a price on dirty energy. Now, it includes language that allocates allowance value in direct consumer relief. We just don't know how much. Now, in the House bill it allocated a full 15 percent of allowance value in direct consumer relief, which fully covered the lowest 20 percent of families on the income scale. At the very least, a Senate bill needs to build on that foundation. To the extent that they can move up the income scale, that's going to be really effective as well.

Monica Trauzzi: So, you would say adequate at this point, but ...

Jason Walsh: I would say adequate at least in terms of the foundation it lays out, but we still have a lot more to see.

Monica Trauzzi: So, the allowance of allocations is going to be a big factor?

Jason Walsh: It's going to be huge, yup.

Monica Trauzzi: OK, the title of the bill focuses on job growth and the potential economic gains of a cap and trade. Do you think that that fairly represents what the bill does?

Jason Walsh: Yeah, I think it does. It puts a megaphone in the ear of every smart investor and entrepreneur in this country and delivers a very loud message that the future of this economy is clean energy, that that's where they should put their money, that's where they should direct their innovation and their business plans. We did a report actually earlier this year, it was released in June, called Green Prosperity with the Political Economy Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which shows that investing in clean energy creates roughly three to four times as many jobs as the same investment in fossil fuel energy. So, as a consequence of that, we took the estimate of $150 billion of investment in clean energy, whether public or private, and that shows a net employment gain of 1.7 million jobs. That's a big deal. Now, these findings are not in isolation. They are consistent with a broad range of studies which demonstrate that it just takes more work to manufacture and install and maintain the sources of our energy, particularly if they're homegrown, than it does to extract it from the earth or cut the top off of a mountain and process it and burn it. So, that's actually just on the renewable energy side. On the energy efficiency side, which in some ways has the biggest potential for job creation, the amount of work that can go into making a building more energy-efficient is exponentially more than the amount of work that goes into letting it waste energy, which is often no work at all.

Monica Trauzzi: All right, so there's a lot left to be debated over the next several months and it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Thank you for coming on the show.

Jason Walsh: Thank you, Monica.

Monica Trauzzi: And thanks for watching. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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