The Obama administration has increased efforts to move climate change legislation through Congress, despite setbacks earlier in the month, and is close to approving a cap-and-trade bill developed by Congress.
Two weeks ago Republicans, along with 20 Democrats, blocked attempts to put a carbon cap-and-trade system into the 2010 budget bill through a Republican-sponsored amendment, defeating the administration's plan to use a process called "reconciliation" to bypass Congress's input on climate change legislation.
An additional amendment a week later prohibited the collection of funds from any carbon-based cap-and-trade scheme by the administration, but was modified by Democrats to allow such a scheme as long as consumers received a subsidy or tax cut to reduce their energy bill.
Obama is trying to have some global warming legislation in place before the next round of UN climate talks in Copenhagen this December, to show that the US is now committed to reducing its carbon dioxide emissions, but the Republicans, with the help of "Blue Dog Democrats," are strengthening their opposition to any such schemes.
The Republicans claim that a cap-and-trade system, in which companies would have to pay for the amount of pollutants they emit in excess of the amount they are allowed or trade for more emission "credits" if they run out, could raise energy prices in the midst of a recession and that the Democrats are moving too quickly to implement legislation that would have a dramatic impact on the US economy.
House minority leader John Boehner said that such a system would "raise taxes on every American who drives a car, flips on a light switch or buys a product manufactured in the United States."
However, the figure quoted by Boehner of an additional $3100 per household is overblown by a factor of ten inaccurate, according to the researcher whose work the Republicans based their figures on.
Denialists scientific research
Pro-climate change groups have had some good news: documents related to the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)—a group of representatives of the oil, auto, and coal industries, which spent years lobbying the public and Congress (before the coalition folded in 2002) that climate change had nothing to do with humans, and helped torpedo the ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in the Senate--show that the group's scientists concluded in 1995 that "the scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."
The scientists' conclusions were never released to the general public until the New York Times broke the story last week. New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin got the details from a lawyer who is involved in a lawsuit between the State of California and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, General Motors and Chrysler.
Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said the behavior of GCC "underscores the need to be wary of some of the industry studies and analyses that will come out" on climate change.
Former vice president Al Gore also attacked the GCC on Thursday in a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, stating that the group "lied to people who trusted them, in order to make money."
When Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson appeared in front of the same committee, they backed attempts by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) to draft cap-and-trade legislation. Waxman, who is chair of the committee, stated his intention to push the bill through the committee in May. More experts are expected to give evidence to the committee later this week as the committee wrestles over where the $65 billion per year, raised by the cap-and-trade scheme, will go.
Paul Guinnessy
