Moderates' Bill To Fight Global Warming Gets Company

CONGRESS DAILY PM
By Darren Goode

July 24, 2007

Four senators today offered a global warming bill that is intended to be less burdensome on business than a competing plan by fellow moderates.

Environment and Public Works Private Sector Solutions to Global Warming Subcommittee ranking member John Warner, R-Va., joined Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in trying to limit the cost of mandating reductions of greenhouse gas emissions through an emissions cap-and-trade program.

Their bill would allow companies to borrow emission permits and pay them back in future years with interest and to buy more offsets to meet their emission requirements.

The bill establishes a seven-member, president-appointed Carbon Market Efficiency Board to oversee the carbon emissions market and, if necessary, permit a temporary increase in emission allocations when prices remain high. The Senate would have to confirm the board members, who would have 14-year terms. This is an alternative to a "safety valve" included in cap-and-trade legislation introduced by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Bingaman* and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that would limit the cost for emitting carbon emissions at $12 per ton for the first year. That safety valve would then rise 5 percent annually over inflation. That bill has won support from a wide range of labor and business groups.

Tim Profeta, director of Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, which helped draft the bill, said today that the safety valve would frustrate environmental goals and any links to international markets, while not allowing for market flexibility. "We simply cannot know what that price will be especially in dealing with long-term projections," Profeta said.

Warner is drafting a mandatory greenhouse gas cap-and-trade plan with Environment and Public Works Public Private Sector Solutions to Global Warming Subcommittee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and it is unclear whether Lieberman supports the bill introduced today.

Profeta is a former Lieberman aide who will testify at a hearing before Lieberman's subcommittee today. A Landrieu aide said she has not signed off on a mandatory global warming bill and would offer today's bill as an amendment to Senate global warming legislation, if necessary. Today's bill is likely to be opposed by environmental groups. Emily Figdor, director of U.S. Public Interest Research Groups' global warming program, said while she is reviewing the bill, "We have major concerns about offsets and borrowing."

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