Tell your Senators: Boost funding for clean transportation in the climate bill

October 8, 2009
By Stephen Lee Davis

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry unveiled a landmark climate bill that could set us on the path toward cleaner, safer and smarter transportation. But one piece still doesn’t quite add up: the funding.

To truly address climate change, the Senate has to fix the serious funding gap in the House climate bill: The House bill directs only an optional one percent of the money it will raise toward clean transportation options, even though nearly one-third of our CO² emissions come from transportation.

Tell your Senators: You can’t solve 30% of the problem with only 1% of the funding.

Now is the time to make ourselves heard: The Senate climate bill doesn’t contain any funding levels yet, so there is still an opportunity to make sure that it includes enough funding to create cleaner, more affordable transportation options for everyday Americans.

Senators Boxer and Kerry deserve our thanks and support — the bill already makes significant strides toward cleaner transportation. It would direct states and metro areas to make plans to reduce transportation emissions and set targets over the coming decades. These goals are a tremendous — and essential — component of the legislation.

But these targets will be nearly impossible to meet if the bill only provides a miniscule share of its funding for cleaner and more fuel-efficient transportation.

Help make sure we both set meaningful goals AND provide communities with the means to reach them. Tell your Senators to adequately fund clean transportation in the climate bill.

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Filed under: Campaign Blog
Tags: action, boxer, CLEAN-TEA, climate bill, featured, kerry

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Rich Bernstein

I don’t think the conclusions here are quite fair. Yes, according to the House bill, 9.5% of auction revenue in the first few years goes to states and they can use a tenth of that (up to about 1% of the total) on transportation projects. Another 3% goes to vehicle technology on average. Other allocations, like the energy innovation hubs, can also include transportation technology funding.

But only about 14% of the total revenue is allocated to programs meant to reduce emissions, so it’s more like a quarter of the funding going to transportation. The other 86% of the money goes to things like protecting consumers from energy price increases.

It is also notable that the bill is set to invest in electric vehicles. This means we should anticipate a shift of transportation emissions to electricity generation sources.

I don’t mean to discourage increased funding of clean transportation; I just think it’s important to get the facts right.

For others interested in the bill details, the summaries and full text of both bills are linked here:

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Majority.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=0c00344c-802a-23ad-4f4d-edb0c9408d2e

http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1633:the-american-clean-energy-and-security-act-of-2009-hr-2454&catid=169:legislation&Itemid=55
Nathan Sandwick

Thank you Stephen,

I am excited to see an excellent climate bill in the Senate, and I agree that there should be more money for sustainable transportation options. By that, I mean that the Senate should make sure to dedicate much more funding for high-quality public transportation and other convenient and affordable alternatives to driving. A prior comment (Rich, above) is quick to observe that a substantial share of the revenues in the House Bill goes towards consumer protection efforts. We should also be quick to recognize that sustainable transportation infrastructure accomplishes BOTH these goals at once: greenhouse gas reductions and consumer protection.

As it turns out, a dollar invested in sustainable transportation infrastructure ultimately results in greater consumer savings than a dollar that might otherwise be used to directly offset increases in utility prices for household customers. Moving Cooler (http://movingcooler.info/) is a recent analysis that explores the cost effectiveness and consumer savings of a wide range of transportation strategies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A comprehensive approach to smart growth improvements – complete with improved transit service, coordinated land use, improved sidewalks, and expanded bicycle lanes – could require as much as $36 billion per year in total implementation costs over the span of the next four decades. This would be mostly a combination of public expenditures – state, federal, and local. I think from a consumer protection standpoint, it would be wise for the Senate to allocate enough of the climate revenues to fund roughly a fourth of such a package. Altogether, consumer savings from such transportation measures could rival the entire value of all allowances under a cap-and-trade program. According to Moving Cooler, we would save an average of about $82 billion dollars per year in vehicle operating costs alone (over the next four decades), thanks to these convenient and affordable transportation solutions.

These viable transportation alternatives would also reduce transportation sector GHG emissions considerably. Communities as a whole benefit from the improvements in access and mobility – improvements that are tenable in the face of population growth, and affordable in the face and rising energy prices.
dprosenthal

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