U.S. Senators Robert Casey, Pennsylvania Democrat, and Mike Enzi, Wyoming Republican, have introduced legislation, the Carbon Storage Stewardship Trust Fund Act of 2009, to "remove a major barrier to private investment in carbon capture and storage."The major barrier? The long-term liability of carbon storage. Pennsylvania and Wyoming are big coal producing states, and the two senators are keen to protect the interests of their constituents. If a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) approach can be put into place so that electric utilities can continue to burn coal without emitting carbon dioxide, so much the better for the coal states. At least that is what Senators Casy and Enzi seem to think.
According to the senators:
"A liability framework is needed that will encourage firms to invest in CCS but that will not relieve the private sector of the responsibility for ensuring that best practices are followed. The purposes of this act are to promote the commercial deployment of CCS through the creation of a carbon storage liability trust fund and the sharing of liability between the private sector and the federal government."Hum...The words "sharing liability" have a funny ring to them.
Sounds as if the senators are asking "big government" to bail out the CCS developers if things go wrong. Would this logic not also apply to a small business person who was taking a chance on a concept that might go bad? Is the federal government going to "share the liability" with these small folks?
No one will ever accuse me of being an economics major, but I thought that private business liked to keep the government at arm's length and that part of the free market system was the freedom to succeed as well as fail. Of course, I'm not being serious but the next time Senators Casey or Enzi rail against "big government," will someone remind them that they are being rather selective when they complain about government programs?
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