January 10, 2020
Comments on the Draft Green House Gas Reduction Act Report from 2019
Submitted by Bill of Rights
At the Frostburg State University Hearing
Dear Governor Hogan, MDE Officials, Citizens and other Elected Officials:
My name is “everyman,” a resident of Frostburg, Allegany County, a citizen of Maryland since 2005. I am the former Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon Society and have been active in environmental campaigns in Maryland, especially to stop fracking. I serve on the Executive Board of the Western Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club, but tonight I am speaking as an individual citizen and as an independent writer about ecology and economics. (And politics). I post my writings at the Daily Kos, where I am Bill of Rights.
I believe that ideas, however deeply buried and distorted, drive our two major parties. I believe that despite the public rhetoric, and a few decent environmental decisions, such as on fracking, and the Potomac Pipeline, that Governor Hogan, and the Draft Plan before us tonight, reflect traditional conservative Republican values, but not from the era of TR. These are well represented in the Governor’s plan to relieve Beltway and related highway congestion by having the private sector take on most of the funding to build not mass transit, but more highway lanes. It won’t work, but the “iron law” of more lanes leading to more cars and more congestion is not one of the iron laws this Governor believes in. The ones he does believe in favor the private sector over the public, voluntary measures over regulations, anti-tax obsessions no matter the cost to the long range good of society, and a cautious, “in due time” attitude towards our Climate Crisis, the opposite of Greta Thunberg’s view that “Our House is on Fire.” Ms. Thunberg was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019. Her public career seems to me inconceivable, impossible to have emerged from a place, and a temperament like Maryland’s. Governor Hogan is the type of politician Greta has in mind when she denounces the slow pace of change. We need to act to meet the Climate Emergency with a World War II “whatever it takes to win” attitude. That’s not what’s before us in this sprawling, evasive and unsatisfactory document. And despite some well-honed public phrases and declarations by the Governor and his Secretary of the Environment, that’s not what’s in the numbers or the presentations that this administration has submitted to the Maryland General Assembly as their official budget documents. Not at all.
Before I get to these revealing budget facts, which demolish the cheerful rhetoric and bring us to the status-quo reality, which cannot do the job staring us in the face, let me state a few important policy views about the document’s positions.
First, it’s Clean and Renewable Energy Standard (CARES) resembles the Obama Administration broad energy policy of “all of the above.” Translation: let the private sector develop them all and let them compete and the winner will emerge, even if it’s not the public’s health or the climate or more broadly, Nature, which is served in outcomes or timelines. We need to close the six remaining coal burning plants in Maryland and substitute not natural gas, which this document strongly favors, but wind and solar ASAP, the big questions being how fast it can be done and whether all the alternative energy can be built here, or whether we need to include broader “wheeling and transmission” by the power behind the sciences, PJM, our regional grid operator. PJM has just been caught up in the confused federal energy policy delivered via a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ruling on December 19, 2019. I will address that at the end of my comments.
It just might help, given the proclaimed state goals, if the Public Service Commission in Maryland was required to address Climate Disruption implications in its permitting decisions. Just a little suggestion along the way, which some other materials being handed out tonight speak to directly.
Second, the treatment of the forestry and biofuels issues are scientifically alarming and not of the scale to meet our emergency. I don’t think harvesting mature trees for any type of fuel results in net carbon storage balance until 10-20 years out, if then. And we need to plant many millions more trees than the numbers given us in this document. It will take a new Civilian Conservation Corps, or Climate Conservation Corps to do that, many thousands of workers, not the tiny staff in Maryland’s current skeleton program: a symbolic program that has as much to do with budget austerity as conservation. The needed expansion can involve our building trades unions if it takes on the vastly underfunded and under-scaled energy efficiency programs currently scattered across agencies, jurisdictions and funding sources. The number of modernized structures so far is pitiful, given the universe and the need. And a new CCC can be a partial answer to Deaths of Despair, people emerging from drug treatment, and from having served their incarceration time. In brief, a broader mobilization is needed and can serve multiple causes: sequestering carbon and helping poor families with energy leaky homes ought to be at the top of the list.
For you see, good citizens of Western Maryland, my vision for the “Right to Life,” and a decent one at that, extends beyond just the fetus, covers the big swath of reality between arrival and departure, birth and death. Indeed, this alternative view already was given a name in 1944: “The Second Bill of Rights. And Nature’s Rights now must be added as well. Time is running out. In the title words of one of the great Christian writers of Western civilization, “Paradise Lost.” It burned down in the fall of 2018. This year, the climate denialist state of Australia is burning down.
And now to the budgetary matters. I read substantial swaths of the 244 pages in the Draft, and I searched all the pages looking for what surely must be there: a chart or table showing how all the climate “action programs” were growing year by year, in both staffing and funding, and highlighting the new initiatives referenced throughout the 244 pages…But no such table or chart exists. The focus is elsewhere, goes every which way, but the summary I’m asking for is crucial to understanding if Maryland is cutting the mustard or not. (And it’s not.) Of course, the retort to me is that’s its all happening through voluntarism, no budget impositions involved. Even granting that objection, given the scope of this report, I would expect to see expansions in state supervisory positions grow substantially…but there’s no mention even of that logical extension.
In fact, the Hogan Administration’s own fiscal documents for FY 2020, submitted in January of 2019, the 24 page Budget Highlights and the more detailed 207 page version, declare the truth. As the Capital News Service reported on Jan. 18, 2019: “…total expenditures for natural resources and environment fell 5 percent since last year to about $1.03 billion.” My own finding: that is the only category of the ten major expenditure areas that had a negative sign in front of it.
It isn’t only the numbers which tell the story. In the 24 page Power Point presentation – “Budget Highlights,” of the $46.7 billion 2020 Fiscal Year submission the “rank” of topics is also revealing: budget priorities are Education, Economic Development and Jobs, Quality of Life – with environmental matters subsumed under this heading, then Infrastructure and Fiscal Responsibility. The Environment does not surface until page 13, and it gets only a page referencing the full funding of $267 million under the Transfer Tax Program – a program which, by the way, depends in part on the real estate industry turning habitat into structures – destruction of the environment to squeeze out the money to “save it” – a unsatisfactory trade-off - too little and too late in the crisis we are now facing; $54 million for Saving the Bay and coastal wetlands…old causes still underfunded, and a tiny Zero Emission Vehicle tax credit zooming from $3-$6 million dollars…small change indeed. You know what the sound bite will be: “we’ve doubled the ZEV tax credit…”
Let’s deliver the number shock “Green Governor” Hogan doesn’t want you to see: out of his $46.7 billion state budget, only 2.2% goes to Green Causes, just $1.03 billion.
It’s no better over at the state’s Capital Budget on page 17 of the “Highlights.” There the pie chart shows the Environmental & Natural Resources “slice” to be only $57 million, dwarfed by eight of the 12 other categories. In the more detailed accounting of the 207 page Highlights, on pages 24 and 25, of the $5.2 billion capital budget for FY 2020, only $479 million goes to the environment, and of the eight bulleted categories, I don’t see one devoted to climate and energy matters.
So let’s get real here. What’s going on between the Green Climate rhetoric in the speeches….and the staffing and funding realities?
Much attention is devoted in the 244 pages to how this Governor’s administration is not like the bad Trump one in Washington, how we are participating in three collective, collaborative efforts Trump Is shunning: The Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI) for our region, aiming to become like the Regional Green Gas Initiative (RGGI) with carbon trading mechanisms, and then the vaguer US Climate Alliance of non-Trumpian states and cities. All well and good, but these are more like holding actions and think tanks than a fast track to meet the urgency of the IPCC Report from October of 2018, the one that startled the world by calling for the necessity of an economic transition of “unprecedented” scope and urgency.
Even the cautious former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, reflecting upon his inventive responses to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, could state that “Extraordinary Times Demand Extraordinary Measures.” But not in these 244 pages.
I looked in vain for the logical place to start in Maryland, a State Green Bank, with startup capital of at least $250 million. Green Banks are referred to only as an idea bouncing around the Climate Alliance discussions, but other states like Connecticut already have them…after all, if we are so green, couldn’t we take one quarter of the Governor’s one billion dollar plus reserve and rainy day fund…mention of which comes early in the Budget “Highlights Document,” along with the achievement of no new taxes, if indeed, that is an “achievement” given the nature of the crises we face.
Of course, Maryland can’t do this alone; its hands are tied not only by the Governor’s conservative fiscal ideology, but state law which says we must balance the budget every year. Combine that legal requirement along with the Republican ideology of “no new taxes,” and environmental scope and urgency are out the window.
And that is why we need the scope and urgency presented in the Green New Deal Resolution and in candidate Sanders Green New Deal document, some 35 pages which details how he plans to spend $16.3 trillion over ten years to turn the nation’s economic and ecological vision, and priorities, around. If one converts those numbers into a percent of the annual federal budget, they dwarf Maryland’s 2.2%. The Green New Deal vision connects all the economically “left behind” regions of America, urban and rural, and shows how they can be brought into the economic and ecological mainstream in a dramatic reform program. The first New Deal (1932-1938) partially succeeded in doing. Its physical achievements remain throughout the state of Maryland, and all through the Appalachians.
Even if Maryland finds itself in a difficult bind of law and austerity ideology, it can still create the outlines, or better yet, templates of programs, like the CCC, and their mission, to be funded when the nation is in far better hands than it currently is at the national level.
And now some closing words about the recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) slant towards saving the old fossil fuel industry, rendered in a confused and conflicted December 19, 2019 decision, rejecting in good part our Grid Operator’s – PJM - attempts to supervise the region’s energy markets, especially its “long term” 3 years out “Capacity Market.” PJM offers a limited version of serious regional “Planning.” Despite conservative rhetoric over the centuries, all sides of the ideological economic spectrum have intervened into markets because no one, business, labor, consumers, or Nature, could live with the damages and disruptions that “pure” free markets visit upon us all. All compete for subsidies, carve outs, exemptions, and today alternative energy has won no matter which way one looks at it: it’s better for our pocket books, better for our health, and better for Nature. It’s time for Maryland and FERC and the shadow energy agency, a private sector firm – PJM – to declare the winner – wind and solar, and then decide what little we still owe the fossil fuel industry. But guess where that takes us: to the Green New Deal’s “Just Transition” concepts and funding. The answer to the muddled FERC decision is the wholesale revision of national energy laws (and regulations) to reflect the Emergency we are in and how we get out of it. An entire philosophy needs to change, and it will take a political revolution to do that at least on the order of the old New Deal and the mobilization for World War II. Neither Governor Hogan nor President Trump is up to that enormous task, to say the least.
Instead, FERC has declared that state subsidies are ersatz and illegal, but it says it cannot consider how all the federal ones over nearly 100 years have affected prices and markets because only Congress can carry out that analysis. In dissent, the only Democratic member of the Commission said the Federal Power Act explicitly gave states, not the federal government, the power to shape their physical energy markets and sources of power, and subsidies of their liking to accomplish their choices are part of that power allocation. The decision is a policy mess, and suits are going to follow from many different parties. It seems to me that the fossil fuel industry, via heavy federal lobbying, is making a last stand, and ready to take Nature down with it.
Now, anyone want to talk about whether that concept, the Green New Deal, might help future situations like the Luke paper mill plant closing? I ran three different searches in the 244 page draft report before us and didn’t turn up a single reference. It’s a painful but true real life catastrophe showing, at a local scale, how globalization and the governor’s brand of economics has let the bottom 60% down, here in Maryland, in rural and de-industrialized America, and indeed, all across the Western world.
I rest my case.
Sincerely,
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD 21532
PS And Governor Hogan, many rural Marylanders who elected you voted to undo everything you say you stand for environmentally when they voted 2 and 3 to 1 for that person in the White House. And the contradictions of your constituency are getting worse, not better. On issue after regulatory issue, the federal government is destroying Nature to benefit corporations and businesses, and threatens to undo whatever you think you have accomplished here in Maryland - MD’s alternative energy protocols – the Renewable Portfolio Standards system - being a prime example thanks to the FERC decision on Dec. 19th.
Sources:
David Roberts at Vox giving the background we need to understand the struggles of FERC in trying to cope with climate change and new sources of energy. Read this first; it anticipates the decision by more than a year: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/3/23/17146028/ferc-coal-natural-gas-bailout-mopr
The FERC decision itself: https://www.ferc.gov/whats-new/comm-meet/2019/121919/E-1.pdf
The broadest possible view of the Green New Deal in our struggling democracy, by two of the finest writers I know - Alyssa Battistoni and Jedediah Britton-Purdy:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/after-carbon-democracy