Climate Bills and a Green Economy

Ruling Elite Pushing Both Parties to Move Forward on Climate Legislation

Some Republicans say open to U.S. climate bill

April 13, 2010

Reuters - Some prominent Republican senators expressed openness on Tuesday to a U.S. climate change bill that might be introduced next week and that would need bipartisan support to have any chance of advancing.

Senator Lamar Alexander, a member of the Republican leadership in the Senate, praised the sector-by-sector approach in a compromise bill aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"I think a sector-by-sector approach makes a lot more sense for dealing with carbon," the Tennessee senator told reporters.

Winning Republican support would be big breakthrough for Democrats and the Obama White House, especially as some Republican lawmakers have been sharply critical of climate legislation because of concerns industry would be hurt and also due to skepticism over the science behind global warming.

The sector-by-sector approach contrasts to an economy-wide approach taken by a bill passed last year in the House of Representatives that was also sharply criticized by Republican lawmakers.

Alexander said he "would consider a cap on utilities only if we could figure out the right way to do it that didn't drive costs up substantially over the short term." [Editor's Note: So 'long term' is o.k.?]

Republican Senator Scott Brown, whose election in January robbed Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority, told Reuters:

"I'm open to reading anything that's being proposed" for climate change legislation.

A trio of senators -- Democrat John Kerry, independent Joseph Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham -- are trying to put the finishing touches on a climate change bill that aims to reduce carbon pollution by capping emissions, starting in 2012, from electric power utilities.



The transportation sector would see a new tax, probably after oil is refined, instead of a carbon cap, although the fee would be linked to pollution permits traded in the utility sector.

As for the third sector -- manufacturers -- Kerry, Graham and Lieberman have been weighing a cap-and-trade scheme like the one for utilities, but phasing it in starting in 2016. Alexander voiced opposition to capping factory emissions.

Kerry would not say whether he has succeeded yet in winning the support of any Republicans other than Graham for the bill he hopes to unveil next week.

Graham told Reuters that the goal was to "put a bill out there the three of us can rally around" and see "the kind of reception it gets once it's rolled out."

But before being introduced, Kerry, Graham and Lieberman still have difficult issues to resolve.

Graham said the trio is "revisiting" how to allocate future carbon pollution permits for electric power companies, a thorny issue that has brought criticisms from various senators, including Democrat Carl Levin from Michigan.

"Things are coming together but there's still some hurdles," Kerry said, without specifying. He said more meetings were needed this week with senators and industry.

Some liberal Democrats attacked the bill's planned inclusion of expanded offshore oil and gas drilling.

"Without very significant alteration of the drilling issues, they'll probably lose my vote," New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez told reporters.

Senator Frank Lautenberg, also from New Jersey who last year voted for an Environment and Public Works Committee climate bill that Kerry's effort builds upon, said expanded offshore drilling could jeopardize his state's beach resorts and related businesses if there was an oil spill.

"I'm not comforted by a 50-mile limitation," on drilling offshore, he added.

The three senators writing the climate bill are hoping to introduce it early next week, according to sources, around the April 22 40th anniversary of Earth Day, an event that sometimes draws derision from some Republicans.

"We're not going to do it on Earth Day," Graham said, adding, "It's going to be offshore drilling day when it's introduced."

Club of Rome Behind Eco-Fascist Purge to Criminalize Climate Skepticism

April 13, 2010

Propaganda Matrix - The British lawyer who last week called for introducing international laws through the United Nations which would make it a crime against humanity to question the reality of man-made global warming has close ties with the Club of Rome – the ultra elitist organization which openly bragged of how it invented the climate change scare as a means of manipulating the global population to accept world government.

British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins (pictured top) recently launched an initiative to have the UN put pressure on national governments to pass laws that would declare the mass destruction of ecosystems a crime against peace, punishable by the International Criminal Court.

Under the guise of going after big corporations and polluters for the war crime of emitting the gas that humans exhale and plants breathe, the proposal would actually target individuals and people who merely express skepticism towards man-made global warming.

“Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change,” reported the London Guardian ...

Senators Prepare Compromise Climate Change Bill

April 11, 2010

Reuters - Six months after introducing a sweeping climate change bill that flopped in the Senate, Democrat John Kerry is preparing to offer a compromise measure that seeks to reel in reluctant senators.

Kerry, collaborating with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, might introduce a new bill promoting clean energy early next week, just days before the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, environmental sources said.

Despite Kerry's consistently upbeat assessment of legislative prospects this year, the new bill also faces plenty of hurdles.

On Friday, a new problem potentially arose when U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement. President Barack Obama said he would move quickly to name a replacement.

That will trigger a Senate confirmation debate that could eat up time -- like the healthcare debate did over the past year -- that otherwise could be spent on the complicated, far-reaching energy and environment bill.

Reacting to the news of Stevens' retirement, Kerry insisted there was time to pass major legislation "and still confirm a new justice."

"Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman will unveil their proposal later this month," Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith said, adding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was "committed to making this Congress the one that finally passes comprehensive energy and climate legislation."

Last week, Obama's top negotiator to international climate talks, Todd Stern, told Reuters that action in Congress was critical for U.S. leverage and credibility in U.N. negotiations toward a global pact controlling carbon pollution.

The United States is second only to China in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Other high-priority initiatives that will tie up the Senate in coming months are the federal budget for next year and an array of spending bills, including one for the war in Afghanistan. Controversial banking industry reforms and additional job-creation steps Democrats want to enact this election year also are stacked up on the runway.

Most senators and environmentalists backing attempts to reduce U.S. smokestack emissions associated with global warming think that if a bill is to be passed before November congressional elections, the Senate must do so by July, before the election campaigns heat up.

Aides to Kerry, Graham and Lieberman toiled over legislative details of their climate bill during a two-week recess that ends on Monday.

Its centerpiece will be a 2020 deadline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels. Oil and coal, cheap and dirty energy sources, gradually would be replaced with more expensive, but cleaner alternative fuels.

The 17 percent lines up with the House of Representatives' target and commitments made by Obama in global talks.

In a move to lure more votes, the compromise Senate bill is expected to have new incentives for domestic oil and natural gas production and expanding nuclear power.

Electric utilities would be the first sector to have pollution controls imposed -- starting in 2012 -- through a "cap and trade" system to bring down carbon emissions with required permits that would be traded in a regulated market.

Factories would join the pollution-reduction system in 2016, industry and environmental sources have been told.

A third sector, transportation, would see a tax levied on refined oil products, a Senate source told Reuters last week, with the expectation it would be passed on to consumers when they buy gasoline and other fuel products ...