Pending Legislation

Just this past fall, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act successfully passed out of the Environment and Public Works Committee to be debated by the full senate.  After several. delays, the bill died on  Friday, June 6, 2008, failing to reach the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture by a vote of 48-36.  The bill was defeated by republicans, concerned that it would damage the U.S. economy.  You can read the bill here and see how your senator voted by clicking here.  

However, this bill was flawed from the beginning.  The Lieberman-Warner bill proposed to reduce emissions just 18% to 25% by 2020 and 62% to 66% by 2050.  This is substantially less than the 83% decrease proposed by  the Sanders-Boxer and Waxman proposals. And, it is not certain that even those targets will prevent the worst effects of climate change. Lester Brown, author, founder of Earth Policy Institute and one of the U.S.'s most respected environmentalists, believes we need to reduce our emissions 80% by 2020.

 

This bill depended upon significant increases in nuclear energy and proposed market-based carbon trading as a way to achieve emissions targets. According to the Pew Center, the Senate vote shows that the next President will come to office with a majority of support in the Senate for greenhouse gas cap-and-trade, and very possibly with the 60 votes needed for passage for the right bill.  However, evidence suggests that cap and trade fails to achieve  emission reductions.  Instead, carbon trading delays and diverts public and private funds that would go to both energy efficiency/ conservation in all its forms and renewable energy and delays the paradigm shift to a green economy, because it diverts billions of dollars of public and private funds into polluting fossil and nuclear  fuels.

　

The problem with cap and trade, and most other policies aimed at enacting this transformation is that they focus primarily on the pollution problem, not the energy supply problem. They attempt to enact a transformation of the global energy economy through pollution regulations and carbon markets, rather than through the deployment of new clean-energy technologies.

　

Surely we can do better? You can read an excellent article on this topic by Bill Moyers here. and watch the June 27 program, Bill Moyers Journal , by clicking on the above image.

　

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