Word: lieberman
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...When the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act - the strongest global warming bill ever to make it to the Senate floor - died last Friday after a nasty, brutish and short debate, most environmental groups found reason to be cheerful. "We have taken comprehensive global warming legislation farther than it has ever gone before," National Resources Defense Council president Frances Beinecke wrote on her blog. "A national limit on global warming pollution is inevitable...
...fair, no one ever called Lieberman-Warner itself inevitable. Sponsored by Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican John Warner of Virginia, and taken to the floor by Democrat Barbara Boxer of California, the liberal chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the bill was never given much chance of passage. Its carbon-reduction targets were tougher than the business community wanted, but not as tough as many greens demanded. And it was complicated, even bloated - it would have raised $6.7 trillion over 40 years by auctioning global warming pollution permits, using great gobs of that money...
...thorny deal-breakers (how to contain costs, what to do about China) that need to be figured out before any such bill can pass. But not much of that table setting took place last week, because the debate never made it past the partisan bickering and economic fear mongering. Lieberman-Warner was strangled in its crib, because moderate Democrats weren't ready to go this far, because Boxer and the enviros weren't willing to compromise on their core issues, and because the opponents of global warming legislation remain strong, even though their favorite old tactic, denying the science...
...Lieberman-Warner, like any cap-and-trade bill, would increase the cost of energy derived from fossil fuels while giving clean, alternative energies an enormous boost. In other words, it would drive up gasoline prices and coal-powered electricity rates in the short term (though by smaller amounts than the doomsayers were claiming last week) while delivering far greater energy savings over the long term - by unleashing a clean energy economy that creates jobs and helps free the U.S from dependence on foreign...
...going to make electricity too cheap to meter - until it came to a standstill over the past couple decades. It's now poised to make a dramatic comeback. At least, that's what many politicians and the media say. As the Senate this week debated the Warner-Lieberman carbon cap-and-trade bill, which would put a federal limit on greenhouse gas emissions, many doubtful senators said they wouldn't vote for the measure unless massive subsidies for nuclear were included. (The bill was shelved.) Even some veteran greens who were once dead set against atomic power, like Greenpeace...