The New Senate Energy Bill: A Preview

By Marc Ambinder
The Atlantic

Despite the odds, Senate Democrats are determined to pass a comprehensive energy bill by year's end. Their best vehicle is likely to debut on April 26, when Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joseph Lieberman unveil their long-awaited legislation. The senators crafted the bill with the politics of climate change clearly in mind -- along with what appears to have been a somewhat successful campaign by climate change deniers to influence public debate about the wisdom of a massive bill during a recession. Skepticism about the trade-offs between new energy policies of any sort, on the one hand, and jobs, jobs, jobs, on the other, is high -- even if the correlation between the two isn't well established. Conventional wisdom holds that no climate change/energy bill can be passed in an election year, but there are solid reasons for Democrats to be hopeful. The Senate effort is truly bipartisan, with bona fide conservative Graham playing a lead role. The structural factors pushing Congress to act, meanwhile, remain the same: industry wants certainty, not ambiguity, and the EPA will begin to regulate in the absence of congressional action. It's worth remembering, too, that many landmark environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Superfund, were passed days ahead of Election Day.

Although the three senators have been relatively leak-proof about the bill's details, the outline and some details of its provisions have been revealed. The bill would set as a target a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels in 2020. The bill takes a sectoral approach to industry: utilities, which generate the most greenhouse gases, would have to start limiting their emissions in 2012. Industrial facilities, which are regionally concentrated and therefore politically contested, would have several more years to adjust before caps were imposed. These would kick in by 2016 -- well after the recession has ended, and presumably after job growth has pulsed. Forcing them to cap emissions now would probably lead to apocalyptic predictions of job losses and entrench opposition from senators and representatives from the states where these legacy factories are keeping people employed. Nota bene: this is one reason why the White House proactively rolled out its nuclear power plant and domestic oil drilling initiatives before the Senate took up the bill.

A moving part, as of today, is pollution reductions from transportation fuels -- the second-largest source of global warming pollution. Many oil companies are lobbying for a tax to be applied after the fuel is refined, which they believe would be a more efficient system compared to including transportation fuels as part of the cap and trade system in the House-passed bill.

Already, Democrats are nervous about having to rebut charges that they're imposing a "gasoline tax," with predictions of $3-per-gallon prices by summer. The bill would link the tax -- or fee -- to the cost of emissions reduction for the utility industry, which could, in theory, more widely distribute the "pain."

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