Word: waxman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Waxman Rangel Miller...
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...
True, no economic forecast of 15 years into the future is ironclad, but there are enough safety valves and offsets in Waxman-Markey to ensure the cost will be manageable. But that's the problem. To keep conservative Democrats on board - especially those in the coal-heavy Midwest and Southeast - Waxman and Markey allowed the bill to be watered down considerably, loosening the overall carbon cap and scaling back the renewable-energy standard. When the powerful farm lobby balked at the bill, it was changed to allow farmers to sell offsets from agriculture, such as no-till farming, which leaves...
...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...