Previously, I sought nominations for companies that might be behind the strange gift tucked away in Lieberman-Warner, under which companies will be granted ration coupons for emissions reductions resulting from actions taken as long ago as January 1, 1994. This could mean millions in freebies to corporate rent-seekers who could sell the ration coupons, or else simply not be forced to buy them, for decisions made for other reasons a decade or more ago.

A well-informed individual has named names. A few utilities signed consent decrees with EPA back in the late 1990s as a result of a major change in enforcement policy, which change was the impetus behind the long-running New Source Review, or NSR, litigation. This resulted in some expensive modifications to their capital equipment (costs that have long since been passed along to customers, no doubt).

These companies included Tampa Electric (TECO), New Jersey’s PSE&G, and notorious climate rent-seeker American Electric Power (AEP) of Ohio — one of the world’s largest coal burners, if not the largest. Most of the rest of the approximately one dozen companies that then-EPA Administrator Carol Browner went after chose to litigate the issue, which was only just resolved, for the most part, last year (disclosure: I filed a brief in SCOTUS’s hearing of the matter, the “Duke Energy” case, on behalf of an interested Member of Congress). The argument at the time for settling was fear of an Al Gore presidency.

Congratulations, gang, you’ve won the Lieberman-Warner lottery! Of course, your windfall is going down in flames. For now. But at least we know who’s sitting on the winning ticket for next time.

Other companies of course stand to specifically benefit from the “early action” provision, if they happen to operate in states which have adopted their own version of the L-W scheme. The irony of this is that these trail-blazing states then run to Washington sobbing about how it isn’t fair that everyone doesn’t have to do what they decided to do to themselves, and that we need a national policy. Furthermore, L-W will do nothing to change this dynamic, once adopted: it does not preempt such state action, but instead allows them to keep raising the bidding and then run to Congress’s skirts for succor.

Such companies include PSE&G, Consolidated Edison, and Northeast Utilities, among others. But it’s the consent-decree signatories who really clean up from this bizarre L-W provision, which pays them for things already done.