Word: billing
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...bill's passage is a palpable victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama - who both made a last-minute push to snap wavering Democrats back in line - and a landmark for the environmental movement. "The American Clean Energy and Security Act is the most important environmental and energy legislation in our nation's history," said Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). "Today's vote is a huge achievement for the country and the climate." (Watch TIME's video: "The Truth About Wind Power...
...That the bill - also known as Waxman-Markey after its co-sponsors, the Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman and Edward Markey - is historic is obvious, as it marks the first successful attempt by Congress to address climate change at a national level. But as the bill moves to the Senate, where the virtual requirement for 60 votes means that passage will be even more difficult, it's far less clear that Waxman-Markey is strong enough to meet the long-term threat of global warming. The sheer difficulty of the negotiations that produced this 1,300-page bill - and the fact...
First of all, it's important to understand what the climate-change bill does and doesn't do. The bill includes a raft of energy-efficiency provisions and a renewable-energy standard that will require 20% of all U.S. electricity to come from alternative sources by 2020. Chiefly, though, Waxman-Markey puts a cap on almost all of the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the U.S. economy - everything from utilities to industry to transportation - setting a limit on how much carbon the country can produce. Industries are issued allowances each year that give them the right to emit a certain...
...bill's opponents - Congressional Republicans, along with the oil industry and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others - say cap and trade amounts to a massive tax on U.S. energy, which mostly still comes from carbon-intensive fossil fuels like coal. That's partially true - the whole point behind cap and trade is to raise the cost of emitting carbon and drive investment in energy efficiency and renewable power. "No matter how you doctor it or tailor it, it is a tax," said Representative Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican...
...critics have vastly overstated the likely cost. In fact, they're all but lying. During the House debate, Republican whip Eric Cantor, using numbers from an American Petroleum Institute study, said that the bill would eventually cost more than $3,000 per family per year - but those numbers assume that billions of tons worth of inexpensive carbon offsets won't be available under the bill, which would significantly inflate the overall cost. That's not going to happen. A more reliable study from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast that the bill would cost the average U.S. household...