Perhaps the most underplayed story of the day is the Lieberman-Warner bill being considered on the Senate floor this week. This is the first big piece of global warming legislation the Senate has weighed since Lieberman’s last version of this, co-authored with John McCain (thus earning the staff nickname McLieberman), went down in 2005.
This time around there are a lot of contentious points that could topple this shaky deal starting with veto grumblings from the Bush administration over the carbon cap-and-trade system, to McCain’s unhappiness with the limited provisions for nuclear energy, to whether or not states can have stronger standards than the federal government (as California does right now). As Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, noted: “The legislation is far from perfect. It would give away too many free emission permits to polluters – it’s rather like paying ransom to a kidnapper. In this case, the kidnapper has stolen our air! Having said that, the global warming problem is real and we need Congress to get moving on a solution.”
Having long ago abandoned any hope of the Kyoto Protocol targets (7% below 1990 emissions by 2012) this bill aims to keep/reduce emissions to the current level by 2012 with a 2% reduction every year after that, said David Doniger, climate center policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The money generated by the cap-and-trade system (one of the best U.S. innovations put to great use in the 1990 Acid Rain amendments for SOx and NOx – ironically, the U.S. gave this system to the Kyoto Protocol and then pulled out of it) would put about $800 billion back into the economy in the form of incentives for green technologies over 10 years. “The basic need is to stop emissions from growing and start reducing them right now,’ Doniger said. “This is a very critical bill, very important.”
Alas, with a Senate that is split by just one vote and a hostile president this measure looks to be a practice round for next year, as with a lot of legislation before Congress these days. “Unfortunately, because of strident opposition of companies and people like Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers – he has likened the bill to a Mafia creation – this Congress won’t pull it off,” O’Donnell lamented. “Passage of this bill is about as likely as Big Brown running dead last in the Belmont Stakes.”