The new and improved (?) senate climate bill is being rolled out in secret meetings and, it seems, being strategically leaked to test the reaction.
The headline numbers are familiar (17 percent reductions below 2005 levels in 2020; 80 percent by 2050) but the rest of the bill seems intended to confuse opponents of prior bills by incorporating cap and dividend and a carbon tax. The deck chairs, as they say, are being rearranged. How does the ship look now?
Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room has a rundown on how Obama’s proposal looks against the Waxman-Markey measure that passed the house last year and the rumors of the senate bill.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have been trying to line up industry support for the measure.
To that end, they’ve turned to Washington’s Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell’s CLEAR act, borrowing from it a cap and dividend plan that puts the government in charge of auctioning emissions then returning the money to consumers.
The senate bill would preempt regional cap and trade agreements and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provisions.
The plan would have a “hard price collar” that limits emissions prices to between $10 and $30 per ton tied to inflation, according to ClimateWire.
The plan functions as more of a carbon tax, which is something that Exxon’s Rex Tillerson could get behind.
The bill would also attack climate change on a sector-by-sector basis and has eight different headings – refining, America’s farmers, consumer refunds, clean energy innovation, coal, natural gas, nuclear and energy independence.
Kerry, Lieberman and Graham seem to have gambled that the only way to get the process moving is to start the industry giveaways early. But the sectoral approach seems awfully confusing and it hasn’t even been watered down yet.
We should avoid passing judgment before the bill is actually out but, frankly, this seems like a mess.
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