Word: markeys
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...newcomer to the capital, fights for money in Congress, there's a bigger battle brewing over the carbon cap-and-trade bill. Co-sponsored by Democratic lawmakers Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, the bill barely passed the House last month and will soon be taken up by the Senate. The legislative fight has mostly centered on how tight the carbon caps should be, but part of the revenues created by the cap - which would require some companies to pay for carbon credits - will be directed to energy research and development...
...need their votes to pass bills. Blue Dogs voted in favor of a number of Bush-era proposals, including the war in Iraq and warrantless wiretapping. They forced Obama to institute a pay-as-you-go budget plan for his $787 billion stimulus bill, recently delayed the Waxman-Markey climate-change energy bill and blocked legislation that would benefit unions. And now seven of the eight Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have threatened to vote down Obama's health-care legislation...
...will take relentless focus to sell health reform and solve the continuing economic crisis. That will not leave much time for climate change, at least not this year - and that is a good thing, because the Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House is an excellent candidate for euthanasia. It is a demonstration of all that's wrong with the legislative process in latter-day America. There is a simple solution to this problem: a carbon tax to discourage people from using fossil fuels. That tax could be immediately refunded in the form of lower payroll taxes...
...dicey, and may not actually provide the emissions reductions they claim to. (Studies have called into question the quality of the offsets run under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol system.) And a new EPA analysis of the bill forecast that the total amount of renewable energy generation under Waxman-Markey would actually be less than the renewable energy that would have been produced without the bill. (The share of renewables in the total U.S. electricity market will be larger under the bill, because total electricity use will have dropped.) Instead of investment flowing to new solar and wind companies...
Despite its many flaws, Waxman-Markey remains a legislative achievement, and even doubtful environmentalists hope to be able to strengthen it in the future if it becomes law - especially if Americans come to realize that cap and trade isn't the end of the economy. "No one looking at this three months ago would have estimated that we'd end up here," says Cochran. But if this is the most that is politically possible in America, we're in trouble, because climate change demands far more. "We are at an extraordinary moment, with a historic opportunity to confront...