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| 7/29/2010 11:14:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article
Comment on this article | EDITORIAL: RIP, cap and trade bill
A year after the House of Representatives narrowly passed a controversial climate bill, the measure's centerpiece - the cap and trade provision - appears fatally wounded.
Under legislation sponsored by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Edward Markey, D. Mass., greenhouse gas emissions would be capped, eventually reducing those emissions by 83 percent in 2050. Businesses and other entities that reduced emissions below the cap, or that were able to sequester measurable amounts of carbon, would be granted credits that they then could sell to polluters who were exceeding the limits. With that, cap and trade was encoded into proposed law.
Although farmers were said to be among the potential beneficiaries of the plan, the Heritage Foundation said Waxman-Markey would have cost agriculture hundreds of millions of dollars a year in increased fuel costs and billions of dollars in farm gate revenues. To achieve the economic benefits envisioned under cap and trade, an analysis by the USDA estimated farmers would have to plant trees on 50 million acres of farm and pasture land.
With 44 Democrats voting against it, Waxman-Markey moved to the Senate with only seven votes to spare. There it has received such tepid support that Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., renamed and downplayed the cap and trade provisions of the energy bill they recently proposed.
Cap and trade is opposed by all 41 Republican senators, who together can block the plan from coming to a vote. They are joined by several Democrats from coal and oil regions who are wary of the havoc cap and trade would wreak on the economies of their states.
The ill-conceived plan has fallen victim to political reality. With the economy only limping along, there aren't huge blocs of voters asking Congress to increase the cost of gasoline, diesel fuel and electricity - or by extension the products and services dependent upon fossil fuel.
Even President Barack Obama, long a vocal supporter of cap and trade, has stopped talking about it, and instead favors an energy bill that focuses on encouraging the development of alternative energy sources rather than climate change. In the last few weeks, that seems to be the direction taken by the Senate.
Waxman said last week that if the Senate passes an energy bill, he would insert cap and trade into the measure when it was reconciled with the House bill in conference committee. If he's successful, the amended version would have to be approved by the Senate. But it seems unlikely 60 senators would embrace a committee-contrived scheme when they have taken great pains to avoid writing their own version of cap and trade.
And that might be the least of the problems facing those who still support cap and trade. It's not entirely clear how many of Waxman's Democratic colleagues in the House would be any more willing to remind voters so close to an election that they favor a massive, job-crushing energy tax.
It seems cap and trade is dead for the remainder of the 111th Congress. We hope that it rests in peace in perpetuity.
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Reader Comments
Posted: Thursday, July 29, 2010
Article comment by:
Rmoen
From my vantage point, there was little support for cap-and-trade. Daily I read editorials, comments and letters-to-the-editor from all over the United States. When the House passed the cap-and-trade bill it was maybe 2-to-1 against cap-and-trade opinion now is off the charts against it.
Frankly, I don't see Americans supporting cap-and-trade or any CO2 regulation until we have our own 'Climate Truth Commission.' ...and no longer rely upon the climate opinions of the United Nations. The UN is a biased political organization whose climate forecasts haven't proven prescient. The United States needs our own objective, transparent 'climate truth commission' to think-through global warming.
-- Robert Moen, www.energyplanUSA
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