Just before the supercommittee on Deficit Reduction resigned itself to failure, Sen. Max Baucus told Montanans he believed we have two choices in life: try or do nothing. Ultimately, some of his colleagues on the committee chose the latter. If they had played their cards right, the supercommittee could have done a lot of good by stopping government intervention where it is doing harm. In particular, they had a golden opportunity to make government spending cuts that also help to protect the environment. Unfortunately, this select group of lawmakers did nothing and now Congress as a whole will need to find a broader compromise to tackle the nation’s deficit crisis.
And we have some ideas as to how they could do it: Our organizations, Friends of the Earth, a progressive environmental group, and the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, have joined with the Ralph Nader-founded consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and the deficit-hawks at Taxpayers for Common Sense to issue a report titled “Green Scissors 2011.” The report offers a roadmap for cutting a third of a trillion dollars over five years in environmentally harmful subsidies — a full fifth of the savings the supercommittee was charged with obtaining, in half the time.
Those who follow environmental and budget issues already know about government programs that harm the environment. For example, the $50 billion-plus five-year tab for ethanol subsidies — which senators Baucus and Jon Tester both voted to end in June — has brought millions of acres of previously wild land under cultivation, increased the use of chemical fertilizers and wasted billions of gallons of water. And there are indirect ethanol subsidies too. The federally backed “Clean Cities” program — untouched by the Senate — has largely been a subsidy to the corn growing industry hidden under the guise of oil savings. And all of these subsidies are on top of a mandate requiring ethanol be used in our fuels.
In fact, many of the dated, silly programs that good government watchdogs cite as egregious examples of waste also harm the environment. More than $8 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees for coal plants (many of which would be built anyway with private funding) provide enormous taxpayer support for the dirtiest of all widely used fuels and, in many cases, actually serve to hurt the coal industry in western coal producing states like Montana. Because of structural flaws in the program guarantees to renewable energy like solar power are prone to mismanagement — witness the Solyndra debacle.
Oil interests — subsidized mainly via huge tax benefits like an “intangible drilling cost” that reduces Treasury revenue by almost $20 billion a decade — also get some of the biggest handouts. This spring, Sen. Baucus asked oil executives on Capitol Hill why they still needed help from taxpayers. He determined these handouts were wasteful and proposed ending them, before work on the supercommittee had even begun. While these are only a few examples of the low-hanging fruit available for savings, the list goes on and on.
To the casual observer, although it might appear that a budgetary compromise between Republicans and Democrats is impossible, Green Scissors and other similar efforts prove otherwise. While the Heartland Institute has an affinity with the Tea Party movement, Friends of the Earth finds itself aligned with the Occupy movement, and yet Green Scissors identifies areas where our two groups can find common ground and work together to eliminate harmful subsidies, reducing the size of the government and protecting the environment simultaneously. If only our representatives in Congress could do the same.
Our work identifies a foundation on which Sen. Baucus and other members of Congress could find a compromise on the deficit. Of course these cuts will not be easy to institute; almost every single subsidy given out by our federal government has an incredibly powerful special interest group behind it. That’s why we need a diverse coalition to support ending these handouts. Montanans need to tell Sen. Baucus and their other representatives to stand against the special interests in Washington. It’s the only way we can prove that while many of us may disagree on how money is spent, we can at least agree on where it should be saved.
Eli Lehrer is national director and vice president of the Heartland Institute, www.heartland.org. Ben Schreiber is climate and energy analyst for Friends of the Earth, www.foe.org
Green Scissors 2011 finds common ground for reducing debt (Helena Independent Record)
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