Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Undersecretary of Energy Kristina M. Johnson on Thursday sat down with industry leaders and a limited number of Tufts students and faculty to discuss energy and environmental issues.
Although the meeting in Ballou Hall was closed to the press, Markey later spoke to the Daily in a phone interview, explaining that the discussion addressed the possibility of a "cap-and-trade" system.
"The conclusion of the community was that we need to put a price on carbon," Markey told the Daily.
Markey, who is the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, also discussed his co-sponsorship of a recent energy bill in the House of Representatives that incorporates such a cap-and-trade policy.
The Waxman-Markey Climate and Energy Bill, which targets greenhouse gas emissions, last June passed the house and has taken the formal name of The American Clean Energy and Security Act.
Markey hopes a similar bill that the U.S. Senate is currently considering will pass within the next two months.
Both bills establish a "cap-and-trade" policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, with the House version requiring a 17 percent reduction in such emissions relative to 2005 levels by 2050, according to Markey.
Markey believes that this bill will inspire further environmental changes and advancements. "There would be an explosion of development of technology to solve the problem of global warming," Markey said.
He explained that this technological revolution will then significantly reduce energy-related costs.
"The benefits of the bill is that it is going to create a green energy revolution, reducing the amount that is spent on gasoline, on electricity because there will be a much more efficient vehicle that people will be driving, much more efficient appliances," Markey said. "So over the long run, consumers are actually going to save money."
Although such a sweeping change may prove beneficial to the environment and the economy, the bill has many opponents and passed the House by only a slim margin.
Markey said that the opposition is unfounded and is largely being propagated by industry players keen to slow down reform.
"I think it is mostly political," he said. "I don't think that there's any science that contradicts the conclusion that global warming is happening. I think that the oil industry and the coal industry have a huge stake in slowing down the passage of legislation."
While political motivations may infiltrate the climate change debate in the United States, many European countries do not face such politicization, a fact that Markey said is due to outside interests.
"Europe does not have a significant oil-gas and oil industry, so there's a greater political tension in the United States," he said.
Coming on the heels of expensive health care legislation, passage of the climate bill could be an uphill battle during a congressional election year where polls show a tight race for control of Congress. Markey, however, said that the bill should aid the slowly recovering U.S. economy.
"As each week goes by, those gasoline increases go higher," he said. "That tax on consumers at the pump can only be rectified by creating a clean energy bill that does not allow the oil industry and [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] to tip consumers upside down and shake money out of their pockets."
Markey also defended the bill against criticism from environmental organizations that claim the reform is too weak.
"It's 17 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050," he said. "That's an extremely ambitious set of goals to reduce carbon emissions."
