If true, this could be the worst news on global climate policy since Copenhagen:
A Senate proposal setting up a cap-and-trade program to curtail greenhouse gas emissions likely will be offered on the floor later this summer as an amendment to a smaller, energy-only approach, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said today.…
As for climate change, Schumer predicted Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) would have a chance to win 60 votes on their plan during the floor debate on the underlying Bingaman bill.
“Kerry has … done a damn good job, and he’s going to, in my opinion, get a chance to offer that amendment, and we’ll see if it has the votes.”
Italics ours - it’s clear that Schumer thinks it doesn’t.
All this matters because, with the Kerry-Lieberman bits stripped out, the bill looks like being all sugar and no pill, as Bradford Plumer explains:
If Schumer’s right, this would certainly lower the odds that Congress will pass a carbon-pricing scheme this year. The logic behind combining everything into one big bill, as Kerry and Lieberman did, was so that the items that were popular with senators (like oil regulations or financial support for nuclear utilities) were mashed together with the unpopular items (cap-and-trade), and there’d be one big up-or-down vote on the whole enchilada. If energy and climate get separated out, then it’s less likely the latter can survive.
Before you slip into depression, it’s worth pointing out that Schumer later softened his comments a little, pointing out that he was only speculating on a possible way to get a bill through the Senate. A final decision will be taken by Senate Democrats by the end of next week, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been pretty clear that a bill lacking serious emissions-reduction measures wouldn’t get her support.
Even so, the grim truth, according to Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, is that the time is running out on for the climate bill - not just for this Congress, but for a generation:
… what are the conditions in which a climate bill seems possible? The normal answer would be a national catastrophe that focuses attention on the issue. An “exogenous event,” as the social scientists say. Something like, I don’t know, the largest oil spill in U.S. history. But actually, it seems like that wouldn’t be nearly enough. And it would be ever further from enough after the legislative math gets harder [after the midterm elections]. So either the Senate manages to move on a climate bill this year or you can pretty much give up on any hope of seriously addressing global warming in the foreseeable future.
