Jul 5 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Dan Wallach The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas


The cascade of doom triggered by an atmosphere saturated with carbon dioxide alarms Entergy Corp. chairman J. Wayne Leonard, who knows his support for the federal clean energy bill could alienate investors and his peers in the energy industry.

America, he said, must show leadership in reversing rising carbon emissions because the rest of the world won't act without it.

Leonard is unusual in his enthusiastic support for a controversial bill currently making its way through Congress that seeks to slash carbon emissions, especially since he is chairman of a major corporation that emits tons of carbon.

He spoke passionately about that support in a telephone interview with The Enterprise on Thursday. He knows the depth of opposition to the bill, particularly in energy-producing Texas.

Here's what Leonard, the chief executive of a $13 billion company sees in the future if the United States fails to begin controlling carbon dioxide emissions:

---By mid-century, air temperature will have increased enough to produce significant melting of polar ice.

---Increased heat further will melt snow and ice, removing much of the white surface that reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it.

---Permafrost will melt, causing more trapped carbon dioxide to escape into the air, raising the temperature even more.

---Drinkable water sources will begin to shrink. Species will be lost. Crops will fail. Economies, and countries, will destabilize.

That's what would occur when carbon dioxide reaches what Leonard called the "tipping point" of 450 parts per million in the atmosphere. We're at about 280 parts per million now, he said.

"We need an 80 percent reduction by 2050," Leonard said.

And the bill in Congress that passed the House and now goes to the Senate seeks to begin reductions in 2012.

Although no one knows how much it might cost consumers, the bill includes what Leonard calls "price signals" that helps to frame the beginnings of the cost.

The bill would authorize permits for carbon dioxide emissions. A ton would cost the permit holder between $11 and $15, starting in 2012. The price gradually would rise during the next several years.

A household emissions calculator from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates an individual's carbon footprint at about 10 tons per year.

The bill does not address or attempt to estimate an individual's cost.

The starting date for carbon emissions reductions is important, Leonard said.

"We need to start," he said. "The longer you delay, the more impossible 80 percent gets."

Others disagree, and opponents are calling it a tax.

U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, criticized the bill on the House floor when it passed last week.

"The cost of electricity is going to go up," he said. "If you use natural gas, a hot water heater, that's going to go up. You drive down the street using gasoline, that's made from crude oil, that's going to go up."

"Because everything that uses energy -- which is everything -- will cost Americans more," Poe said. "The energy companies, the ones that stay in America, they will pass that tax on to consumers, and the consumers pay because the consumers always pay."

The three members of the Texas Railroad Commission sent a letter to the two Texas senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, strongly urging them to oppose the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

"It will disproportionately and drastically negatively impact Texas jobs, economy, and above all, every Texas energy consumer," the three elected railroad commissioners said.

Commission members include Elizabeth Ann Jones, Victor Carrillo, and Michael Williams.

"Any attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions must not eliminate American jobs and diminish the ability of American industry to compete in the global marketplace.

"Further, we must not adopt any 'climate change' policy that adds to the already high costs of power and gasoline. We must ensure that any adopted regime to reduce carbon emissions does not result in the off-shoring of international trade sensitive industries," the commission members said.

Leonard said the rest of the world will not begin to address carbon emissions until the United States acts.

And the world's second-largest emitter -- China -- needs U.S. leadership and technology, he said.

"We won't become a second-class economy," Leonard said. "This is aimed at getting carbon out of the environment, not to stop using fossil fuels."

Bill Day, spokesman for Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. refinery operator, said the San Antonio-based company opposes the bill because it could result in greater importation of refined product from countries that do not have the burden of carbon-emission permits.

"That's something we're worried about, and consumers should be worried," Day said.

"The refining industry would have to buy equipment to reduce carbon and buy credits," he said. "There's no return on those investments. It would be passed on and costs would go up."

Valero's largest refinery is in Port Arthur. That facility has a 325,000 barrel-per-day capacity.

Neil Carman, the Sierra Club environmental group's director for air programs in Texas, said the country lacks an accurate inventory of carbon in the atmosphere.

Cathy Milbourn, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said there is no county-by-county or state data on carbon dioxide emissions.

The EPA, however, has quantified the national emissions of all manmade and natural sources at about 7 trillion tons in 2007.

Part of that is the natural carbon cycle in which the gas moves back and forth from carbon dioxide to oxygen from plants during photosynthesis.

The rest is manmade and builds up in the atmosphere.

That is what the Clean Energy bill seeks to begin to control.

Carman said there always has been resistance to pollution control technology.

Removing "enormously harmful" lead from gasoline is a prominent example, he said.

Industry eliminated lead because of government regulation.

"The U.S. historically has been a leader in pollution control technologies," said Carman, a onetime member of the Texas Air Control Board, the regulatory agency that eventually became part of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Carman said there are exaggerations on what controls will cost.

The bill pending in Congress would direct the EPA to write guidelines on the costs.

Leonard calls the bill "the best we've seen to address climate change."

He said each passing year results in less time to plan.

"It's not a perfect bill. Everyone can find something to complain about. But it's fair enough," he said.

Leonard strongly disagrees that the permit approach to carbon emissions represents a tax.

"We're not sending a consistent message to Americans," he said. "It's not a tax. You're being charged a fee for the damage you're doing to the environment."

He said 20 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from coal plants in the United States and China.

Whatever control technologies are developed to scrub carbon dioxide from emissions must also work for China, he said.

To convince the Chinese to adopt such technology "is above my pay grade," he said.

Leonard said he believes business and industry should have more accountability.

"This is a personal issue of morality," he said. "We'd be the first generation to ask if we're more important than any other generation. We are not."

-----------------

What cap and trade defines as the emissions problem:

Carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion is the largest source of greenhouse gas in the United States, accounting for 79 percent of "global-warming potential" emissions since 1990.

It has increased an average of 1.3 percent a year from 1990 to 2007.

The five major fuel consumption sectors are:

Electricity generation

Transportation

Industry

Residential

Commercial

Of those, the allocation of emissions is:

Transportation -- 33 percent, and of that 60 percent is from gasoline.

Industry -- 27 percent

Residential -- 27 percent

Commercial -- 18 percent

Electrical generation accounts for 36 percent of U.S. energy consumption from fossil fuels.

Electrical generation relies on coal for more than half of total energy requirements and represents 94 percent of all coal consumed in the United States in 2007.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

(c) 2009, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services