Senate Climate Plan to Cut Greenhouse Emissions 20%

Democratic Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer offered a plan to limit greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming, saying they will work to get it enacted by December.
At a campaign-style rally on the Capitol lawn today, the senators cast climate change as a pressing national security issue that threatens to depress the economy and bring social upheaval.
“Unless we act decisively, climate change could become a threat multiplier, a lit match on the kindling of an already dangerous world,” said Kerry, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “Our health, our security, our economy, our environment all demand we reinvent the way America uses energy.”
Kerry and Boxer’s bill seeks to curb emissions by creating a market for companies to buy and sell pollution permits. It would require U.S. power plants, factories, refineries and other large polluters to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent through 2020, a deeper cut than the 17 percent approved by the House earlier this year. (Source: Bloomberg.com)

Separately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it will begin regulating large sources of greenhouse-gas emissions such as power plants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled the EPA could regulate such gases under the existing Clean Air Act.

Stalled Effort
Today’s announcements from the Senate and the EPA may renew momentum for Democrats’ stalled effort to pass climate legislation by year’s end. Some businesses that oppose using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions view a cap-and-trade approach to emission controls as a less-costly alternative to EPA mandates.
“The question shifts from whether the government will act and clean up corporate pollution to how it will be done,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation.
The Senate measure seeks to minimize carbon price volatility with a reserve of pollution permits that the government would auction at a minimum price beginning at $28 a ton in 2012. Boxer called the provision a “soft collar” on prices designed to limit speculation.
The bill numbers about 800 pages yet is silent on how to distribute billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, or allocations, in the program’s early years. That provision is designed to ease companies’ costs as they cut pollution and invest in clean technology.

‘Skated on the Issue’
“They’ve skated on the issue of allocations, clearly the most controversial part, the most political part,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters.
Like the House plan, the Senate bill would allow polluters to buy emission credits, or offsets, from third parties such as farmers whose practices keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. The Senate bill requires that three-fourths of the annual 2 billion tons of available offsets come from domestic projects.
Unlike the House measure, the Senate bill would not pre- empt the Clean Air Act, which was written to regulate ozone and five other common pollutants.
Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want to block the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gases. Other groups have demanded that any climate legislation replace, not add to, existing pollution laws.
“We’re prepared entirely to consider that,” Kerry said in a telephone interview. “I would accept pre-emption providing they are accepting the targets” of cutting emissions by 20 percent.

Republican Support
Kerry, of Massachusetts, and Boxer, a Californian and chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, will try to win support from Republicans as well as moderate and conservative Democrats. Kerry has been meeting fellow lawmakers for months and said he will announce Republican support for the bill in coming weeks.
President Barack Obama has asked Congress to pass a bill before December’s United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen. He said today he was “deeply committed” to enacting legislation.
The Senate proposal builds on a measure passed by the House on a 219-212 vote in June after months of bargaining over which industries should receive the free pollution permits. The House bill aims to cut fossil fuel emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

More Difficult Path
The climate change plan faces a more difficult path in the Senate, where Democrats are divided by regional and philosophical differences. Six of the Senate’s 20 committees are working on the legislation.
Boxer’s environment committee has 12 Democrats and seven Republicans. The panel’s top Republican, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, told reporters yesterday the “radical” measure would win the panel’s approval with no Republican support.

Coal-state Democrats also weighed in against the measure.
“The bill is a disappointing step in the wrong direction and I am against it,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. “Requiring 20 percent emission reductions by 2020 is unrealistic and harmful.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in a statement “it won’t be an easy task to develop a bill that achieves these goals in a cost-effective way that can garner the 60 votes likely needed for passage, but I believe that by we can succeed by working in a bipartisan manner.”
Sixty votes are needed in the Senate to thwart stalling tactics used to derail legislation.