The US Senate on a 55-43 vote Oct. 30 rejected a bipartisan mandatory carbon dioxide reduction plan unpopular with most US oil companies and power generators.
Although the bill never was expected to pass, sponsors Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) pressed for a vote as a way to nudge colleagues into taking a more serious look at the climate change issue.
"We've lost a battle today, but we'll win over time because climate change is real. And we will overcome the influence of the special interests over time. You can only win by marshaling public opinion," McCain said.
But McCain's colleague Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) rejected the argument that climate change is an environmental problem, calling it a "hoax."
Following the Senate's rejection of the measure, Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the bill "would eliminate jobs, dramatically increase electricity prices and, as several senators noted, impose significant burdens on the poor, the elderly, and minorities, all the while doing nothing for the environment."
Proposed legislation
The proposed legislation required industrial plants to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 or face fines pegged to the market value of emissions credits.
Companies not complying would be fined for each ton of greenhouse gas over the limit; the penalty pegged at three times the market value of an emissions ton. To gain votes, bill supporters retooled the measure by expanding a credit-trading system, and offering exemptions to the agricultural and residential sector. Yet in the end, other lawmakers' concerns over the bill's costs overrode possible environmental benefits.
Mainstream environmental groups and public interest groups acknowledged the defeat was—for now, at least—a decisive one against mandatory CO2 caps but called the vote an important first step.
"It may be some time before a bill like this can be enacted. But thanks to this bill, Congress is for the first time engaged in a genuine debate over climate solutions," said Eileen Claussen, director of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "This debate is long overdue. This is a beginning."
She said that the bill coupled strong environmental goals with a flexible market-based approach to allow business to reduce emissions at the lowest possible cost. The group cited an analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists that found the cost to the average US household would be just $15/year in 2010.
Two non-US based multinational oil companies, BP PLC and Royal Dutch/ Shell Group, and Philadelphia-based refiner Sunoco Inc. belong to a business coalition founded by Pew that accepts there is solid scientific evidence to support that fossil fuels contribute enough to climate change to justify emission reduction targets. But those three companies are more the exemption than the rule within the oil industry.
Skeptics applaud vote
The latest revisions to the bill were not nearly substantive enough to satisfy skeptics, especially free-market advocates and industry groups who felt the plan was a prescriptive and expensive fix for environmental phenomena not fully understood.
"The Senate took the right action," an American Petroleum Institute spokesman said. "If that bill had become law, it would have damaged the economy, sacrificed jobs, and burdened American families and businesses with significantly higher prices for energy including gasoline and diesel fuel."
API and other industry groups have paid for studies that have found the potential cost of mandatory greenhouse gas controls to be hundreds of dollars/ year because of higher energy costs. A better approach is to accelerate relevant research on the climate change issue, the trade group suggested, an idea already endorsed by the White House in its current federal budget and in pending energy and appropriations bills.
Similarly, a conservative business think-tank warned that the bill would have created a mechanism similar to that called for by the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, thereby increasing the price of energy and setting the stage for more-stringent and more-expensive greenhouse gas emission caps later.
"The cap-and-trade approach to rationing energy use would be a hidden tax on all Americans," said Myron Ebell, director of Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "The Lieberman-McCain bill is pointless political grandstanding and a shameless con game. They assure us that the initial costs will be low but hope that we won't notice how expensive it quickly becomes. The Kyoto Protocol was always a dead-end approach, and now it's dead, and Sens. Lieberman and McCain need to get over it and move on to some other fashionable big government cause."
Ebell argued that even if the measure had passed, US emissions reductions would have had zero effect on global greenhouse gas levels. "Large-scale emitters like China and India are increasing energy-use rapidly and have emphatically rejected any limits on their emissions now and in the future. Any attempt to decrease emissions by rationing energy in the US, although extremely harmful to our economy, would be overwhelmed in coming decades by emissions increases in the developing world."
The Senate's vote also reflects there is no consensus on including CO2 emission rules under clean air laws, an electric utility spokesman said. "As Congress seeks to pass multiemissions legislations any continued insistence on carbon provisions is likely to reduce the chances of timely action," said Scott Segal of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. "Simply put, it would be unwarranted to address CO2, which is not a pollutant, in any multiemissions proposal. Adding CO2 requirements could delay enactment of legislation and the resulting environmental benefits of reduced emissions."
