In David Roberts' story about Henry Waxman's long struggle to strengthen the Clean Air Act (part one, two), some important lessons were unavoidably overlooked, because Waxman inherited, struggled with, and never did manage to remedy a serious architectural flaw embedded in the original 1970 version of the law.

When I first lobbied on clean air in 1970, there was a crucial but often forgotten fork in the road. Environmentalists urged Senator Edmund Muskie, who was leading the charge, to require that all polluting facilities, new and old, be modernized and cleaned up. When the business community pushed back and told Muskie that old power plants, refineries and factories were not worth cleaning up because they would shortly be retired, Muskie compromised.

Muskie believed that his compromise didn't matter, because the plants over time would be phased out, and because he had a back-up mechanism -- every airshed was nominally required to meet health-based air quality standards. Cleaning up existing plants was anticipated to result from this state-based process.

Unfortunately, Muskie misjudged. Companies found ingenious ways to continually upgrade and modernize facilities, turning them into virtual vampires: polluters that cannot be killed. As I write, there are 145 operating coal-fired power plants built before 1950; two-thirds of the coal fleet was constructed before Muskie passed the Clean Air Act.

The state-based process for meeting air quality standards also floundered. When states refused to clean up existing polluters and couldn't meet the standards, Congress just gave them more time to do the job. Today, 40 years later, the nation faces an enormous air pollution problem, almost all of which results from emissions from these "grandfathered" vampire power plants.

All of this wasn't a case of the law failing because its initial standards were too weak -- it was a case of a basic design flaw which made it almost impossible to ever recover.

Compare this with the treatment of motor vehicles: Although the initial emission standards set for cars were far too weak, in this case the design was solid, the foundation strong -- old cars really do wear out and get replaced by new ones. As a result, the Clean Air Act has been far more successful in cleaning up automotive pollution than emissions from power plants.

Over the years, Waxman has indeed been able to make tremendous progress in the face of this flaw. Over time he imposed more and more stringent emission controls on many grandfathered facilities, and in 1990 he applied the cap and trade sulfur program to all power plants, including the old ones. But if the 1970 act has set a deadline for old plants to clean up -- even what would have seemed like a very slow deadline in 1970 -- the air we breathe would be far cleaner today. (And, incidentally, since old coal plants are the biggest source of CO2, our global warming pollution would also be much smaller.)

In writing the sulfur emission and trading rules in 1990, Waxman made sure that his architecture was tight. Every plant has an emission standard -- and it could only obtain additional permits if another power plant cleaned up its sulfur.

That's how Waxman designed the original cap and trade program for carbon dioxide this year. But what he reported out of the House Commerce Committee had some enormous loopholes in it, in the form of billions of tons of offsets via which projects like tree planting or supporting clean energy overseas could be substituted for cleaning up one power plant or another.

This is the kind of "leak" in the system that Muskie allowed in 1970 -- and if we don't fix it in the Senate climate deliberations, it could be fatal. We don't have forty years to start cleaning up coal-fired power plants and other grandfathered carbon emitters.

Fortunately, we can fix it without getting into the wrangle about allocating permits. Congress or EPA should simply specify that every boiler, on its 50th birthday, loses its status as an "existing facility" and must be modernized the meet the pollution control standards for new power plants.

The key lesson, in my view, is that a solid foundation is essential. Even if we don't build the whole structure at once, we must get the basics right. And cleaning up every grandfathered power plant as it reaches its 50th birthday is the key to having a strong foundation for solving global warming in the 21st century.

Related Links:

John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles

George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

Al Franken (D-Minn.)

The other day I recounted the fascinating story of how Rep. Henry Waxman and his allies in the House spent a decade working to defend and strengthen the Clean Air Act. Waxman has reportedly said that those curious about the current climate/energy struggle should study the CAA fight.

So what lessons can be learned? And do they apply today?

1. Marathon, not a sprint

One thing that's clear from the CAA chapter and Waxman's book as a whole is that legislative victories do not come quickly, or all at once. Behind every advance is years of painstaking, persistent, often frustrating labor.

Waxman likely sees the climate fight the same way. (That is the theme of Charles Homans' excellent profile of Waxman from this spring.) The appropriate comparison for ACES is not the Clean Air Act as it exists today but the Clean Air Act as passed in 1970, in all its weakness and insufficiency. ACES is the first battle in what promises to be a long war; the job of consolidating gains and seeking new opportunities doesn't end.

Of course, the problem with climate change is that there isn't a ton of time left. Thousands of people prematurely dying from inhaling smog is, however inhumane and immoral, sustainable. Things could go on like that indefinitely. But climate change is heading toward what many scientists fear are tipping points beyond which further changes will be unstoppable and irreversible. Then it really will be out of our hands. With such enormous pressure, is there time for a multi-decade fight?

2. Find allies wherever you can

At various points in the long fight, help comes from unexpected quarters, including Republicans and conservative Democrats. (At one crucial junction in the CAA battle, Waxman fought off an attack by cosponsoring an amendment with Republican Bill Dannemeyer, whose proposed solution to the AIDS crisis was to quarantine gays on an island in the South Pacific.) Even where the ideological gaps are huge, there are individual issues where opportunistic alliances can be made. Waxman never holds a grudge; his talent is relentlessly identifying and exploiting these opportunities.

But the tone of the book changes somewhat when discussing events after 1994 -- that's when a particularly radical group of Republicans took over the majority in the House and Senate. Democrats didn't regain control of both houses until 2006. In the intervening 12 years, Republicans did not adopt Waxman's strategy of opportunistic alliances, or any alliances at all. They enforced rigid party discipline, completely shut Democrats out, manipulated and ignored procedural rules and precedents, and generally encouraged an atmosphere of rancor and knife fighting that still hasn't faded.

And that's just it, what seems different now than during the CAA fight. As Harold Meyerson puts it in an op-ed about the healthcare fight:

Problem is, bipartisanship ain't what it used to be, and for one fundamental reason: Republicans ain't what they used to be. It's true that there was considerable Republican congressional support, back in the day, for Social Security and Medicare. But in the '30s, there were progressive Republicans who stood to the left of the Democrats. ... In the '60s, Rockefeller Republicans supported civil rights legislation and Medicare.

Today, no such Republicans exist. In New England and New York, historically the home of GOP moderates, Republicans occupy just two of 51 House seats. Nationally, the party is dominated by Southern neo-Dixiecrats.

Let me be somewhat injudicious and add that, perhaps in part thanks to increasing ideological homogeneity, the House Republican caucus has also gotten steadily stupider and meaner. What was once a semi-coherent ideological program has been reduced to catechisms. All that's left in the party of Rush is mindless opposition. I mean, Joe Barton is reading the sports section.

To be fair, Waxman did manage to peel off eight Republican votes for ACES. But that's a pretty paltry number. And those eight are getting crucified at home over their vote. There won't be as many yeas for the final bill.

The broader and more diverse your coalition, the more leverage you have. With Republicans completely off the table, the coalition is necessarily narrow and partisan. The dynamic shifts; there are fewer wild cards. Conservative Dems know the numbers are razor thin and they hold the bill's fate in their hands. They have all the power and Waxman's virtually unarmed (except for the muted support of a popular president). He's been savvy about easing fossil-state Dems on board, but it's all been concessions to the likes of Rick Boucher (Va.) and Collin Peterson (Minn.). Republican rigidity has left him with few cards in his hand.

3. It never costs as much as they say it will

Says Waxman, "while industry claims often frame the debate, they are usually exaggerated, not accurate descriptions of the truth but tactics to stop unwanted measures, regardless of need or merit." In story after story, on issue after issue -- orphan drugs, pesticides, nutrition labels, cigarette warning labels, acid rain -- big business wails that it will be driven bankrupt and the economy destroyed. Every time, legislation passes and they turn out to be wrong, because, as Waxman puts it, "good legislation works as intended." Every time, problems are meliorated and the economy continues merrily growing. Every. Single. Time.

Despite the evidence of history, though, industry claims continue to drive the narrative. They're back at it again on climate, with the same old dire predictions. Once again, there are endless squabbles over bogus economic projections. It's all he-said she-said on costs.

It's probably a lost cause to get the media to cover industry claims more skeptically. But why haven't Dems learned to flip the script? By now they should have built a meta-narrative: this always happens; they're always wrong. They have fear mongering; we have history. There they go again. The public doesn't know it's being repeatedly and deliberately scammed. Instead of litigating individual claims, Waxman and crew should be drawing attention to the bigger pattern.

4. Progress is rare and hard fought, but it's usually durable

Americans now take nutrition labels utterly for granted. They fly on airplanes without breathing cigarette smoke and never think twice about it. The fact that lettuce does not poison them goes unremarked.

Yet these were all highly controversial fights. Waxman engaged in them over extended periods of time, with little public support, often against immense odds. These days no one thinks about them other than to wonder what the fuss was and why it took so long. From big things like Social Security to little things like air bags, once measures benefiting everyday citizens are in place, politicians mess with them at their own risk. When legislation is being debated, the public fears costs; after legislation is passed, the public enjoys the benefits. Turns out the public likes public health.

Once universal health care finally comes to America, it will never go away. So too with clean energy and carbon reduction programs. Republicans know this, which is why they fight so ferociously to prevent the first step.

If forward movement is difficult but backward movement is rare, then it makes sense to take whatever ground you can, whenever you can.

So ...

I know plenty of green activists who think Waxman blew it. They think he should have started with something stronger than the USCAP plan and bargained down from there. They think he should have stuck to his guns and forced a showdown over targets, or agricultural offsets, or subsidies for carbon-capture-and-storage technology. They think he should have worked more closely with the White House to do public advocacy rather than backroom dealmaking.

I don't want to get into these disputes (again), but it's worth making at least one point: Waxman has been doing this for a long, long time. He's very, very good at it. He's won some extremely unlikely victories against long odds. This doesn't mean he deserves automatic deference, but he has earned a presumption of trust. If you think, from your perch behind your computer, based on your study of news reports and blog posts, that he could have done better ... and he thinks, with his decades of experience and years spent in close consultation with colleagues on this issue, that he couldn't ... at the very least you should reconsider using so many exclamation points.

Green activists see the fight over ACES as The Showdown, the make-or-break moment. That's almost certainly not how Waxman sees it. He thinks he's in the early skirmishes of a long war. That difference in perspective explains why, despite the concessions he's been forced to swallow, he's never lost his placid calm. He's not arm wrestling; he's playing chess.

Related Links:

John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles

George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

Al Franken (D-Minn.)

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee and coauthor of the ACES bill passed by the House in June. Naturally, political observers are curious about his thoughts on the fight to pass climate/energy legislation this year, but in media interviews he tends to be careful, measured, and fairly abstract. He doesn't do his work in public.

It turns out, however, that Waxman has offered a fairly clear guide to his thinking, and even told us where to find it: it's in chapter five of his new book, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. (The book is coauthored with writer Josh Green, who wrote a stellar piece on clean energy last month for The Atlantic.)

A brief aside about the book: it's fantastic, less the primer promised by the title than a series of first-person yarns containing startling measures of suspense, drama, and pathos. It sounds strange to say about a book mostly composed of congressional investigations and hearings, but it's a real page-turner. And there are victories. No matter your skepticism about government, you will be inspired.

The point of this post isn't to review the book, though. For that see the The Washington Post and the L.A. Times. This is about chapter five, the battle(s) over the Clean Air Act.

Defense

The CAA was originally passed in 1970 and strengthened in 1977, but when Reagan rolled into D.C. in 1980, killing it was one of his top priorities. He had enormous popularity among the public, universal backing from industry, broad support in Congress, and a willing co-conspirator in Energy and Commerce chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), who then as now represented the auto industry. It was grim.

Waxman, who chaired the environment subcommittee, launched what was effectively a guerilla campaign. To begin with, he used every procedural trick and delay in the book, trying to slow the juggernaut. When the bill went before the full committee, Waxman offered amendment after amendment seeking fissures in the opposing coalition. As Waxman says, "our strategy was to muster all our strength to deny one industry its favors, and in doing so, set off a chain reaction -- if one industry pulled out, others might waver, too, eventually turning the coalition members against one another." And that's what happened. The crucial turning point was a toxic air amendment that effectively soured the deal for the chemical industry. It passed by one, shaky, uncertain vote. With that, Reagan's overwhelmingly favored effort to gut the CAA died.

(Suffice to say, this chapter is illuminating on the subject of why Dingell and Waxman can't stand each other, and why Waxman felt the need to effectively pull a coup on the committee last year.)

Offense

For the rest of the decade, Waxman methodically built a coalition to strengthen the CAA and address, among other problems, acid rain. Many behind-closed-doors meetings with Midwest Democrats ensued, along with field hearings highlighting the economic benefits of the policy. His effort was defeated in 1983, and again in 1984. Later in 1984 came the devastating explosion at the Bhopal pesticide plant in India, which captured public attention; Waxman jumped on the opportunity to hold a field hearing at a similar plant making similar chemicals (and with similarly few safeguards) in the U.S.

In 1985, yet another ambitious attempt ended up stripped almost bare, leaving only the Toxic Release Inventory, which merely required polluters to disclose their emissions. As it happens, TRI galvanized the debate in a way no one expected. When members of the public found out exactly how much pollution they were breathing, and where it came from, and how their cities compared to other cities, their appetite for pollution control increased markedly.

What Waxman calls the "turning point" was a somewhat obscure amendment fight in 1987, over compliance deadlines. The day before the vote, Dingell and Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) publicly predicted an easy defeat of the Waxman/Conte amendment. The following day it passed with a 95 vote margin, an unexpected, resounding win for the growing coalition behind clean air.

By 1989, with Bush I (the self-styled "environmental president") in office and Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) replacing Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as Senate majority leader, new regulations seemed inevitable; industry was divided and infighting, scrabbling for deals. Waxman and his allies went straight after Dingell, pushing tougher tailpipe standards, figuring if they got that Dingell would roll on other industries. The two key votes turned out to be Republican Tom Tauke (Iowa), who got some protection for tractors, and conservative Dem Ralph Hall (Texas), who got sheer, cussed persuasion.

Victory

Dingell cracked and made a deal. The unexpected alliance of Waxman and Dingell led to more deals, momentum, some marathon negotiations over acid rain, and ultimately a bill through the House.

What happened next is interesting indeed:

The Bush administration made a key strategic miscalculation that wound up strengthening the law considerably in the final stages of negotiation. Bush officials played an active role in negotiating the Senate bill, but not its House counterpart. Assuming that a weaker bill would emerge from the House, White House negotiators had insisted that the Senate agreement bind the subsequent House-Senate conference, as Dingell and I had agreed to do. By freeing senators to vote as they wished, the administration expected that they would combine the weakest elements of both bills in to the final legislation. Instead, with an election looming, they supported the strongest provisions in both bills, producing a law that was much better than either the House or Senate drafts had been.

Thus: the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. Here's what happened next:

Five years after its passage, more than half the U.S. cities that exceeded urban smog standards had come into compliance. Production of ozone-depleting chemicals had dropped by more than 90 percent. Power plant emissions that cause acid rain fell to half their 1980 levels, and at a fraction of the cost industry had predicted. ... When fully implemented, the law will prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths, tens of thousands of hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, and millions of lost workdays each year.

That strikes me as well worth a decade of fighting.

What can we learn from this tale that's germane to the fight over climate legislation? I'll address that in a future post, but please, share your own interpretations in comments.

Related Links:

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles

George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

Henry Waxman and Ed Markey seem to have mastered the art of the non-concession concession: striking deals with potential opponents in ways that meet their needs while minimizing (though not entirely eliminating) the negative impacts.

Similar to their distribution of allowances, which seemed at first glance to be a massive giveaway but turned out to be far more equitable, the latest compromise between Waxman and House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson seems to fall into this category. The agreement installs a five year moratorium on calculations for how ethanol and other biofuels affect international land use. Climate pollution is released into the air when American farmers switch their land from growing food to growing fuel, and South American agricultural interests burn the rainforest to clear land to grow additional food to fill the gap.

At first glance, that seems pretty bad, and in some ways, it is. As Environment America’s Anna Aurilio pointed out in E & E (sub required), "No one should be trying to legislate away scientific inquiry.” That’s true – and if there’s a possibility of undoing this concession, we should seize it. But in terms of actual impact on land and greenhouse gas emissions, this concession may be minimal. The 2007 law that mandated a “Renewable Fuels Standard” already exempts 15 billion gallons of ethanol from these land use requirements, and production may not exceed that mark, or exceed it significantly, within the moratorium’s five year time frame – meaning that this provision may have little immediate effect.

However, this concession does essentially punt the question down the road, which means that environmentalists and others concerned about ethanol’s impact (like anyone who pays more for food as a result of ethanol mandates), will have to be very vigilant five years from now to ensure that EPA does actually assess whether ethanol and other biofuels that destroy rainforests should qualify under the Renewable Fuels Standard.

There’s another way in which the legislation may make this concession less damaging than it seemed at first glance. The bill’s tropical forest provisions, which I summarized in this Center for American Progress post and here at Grist, will make deforestation much less financially attractive. By valuing forests for the carbon they store – and by providing incentives for reforestation – they make expansion into pristine areas much less likely. At current carbon prices, a hectare of rainforest could be worth $10,000. Depending on the price of carbon and the price of ethanol, it may make more strict financial sense for land owners, communities, and governments to invest in conservation instead of destroying forest for agricultural land for biofuels or other purposes.

In some cases, that will even be true in the United States where agricultural land values are much higher – farmers may be able to make more from reforestation or restoring their land to native prairie than continuing ethanol production, leading to a welcome conversion of at least marginal land to carbon-sequestering Nature.

The other main concession Waxman made was giving the Department of Agriculture primary jurisdiction over deciding what agricultural activities could qualify as offsets. As Tom Philpott chronicled here at Grist, if USDA continues its long tradition of altering science to meet whatever Big Ag’s financial interest du jour is, that could mean farmers would just get credit for pouring Monsanto’s Round-Up pesticide on genetically engineered crops.

But there’s some hope that USDA would actually apply science. In addition to bringing offsets to scale, we must also ensure that the offsets markets have high standards of environmental integrity to ensure that offsets result in real and measurable greenhouse gas reductions while bolstering efforts to conserve soil, water, and fish and wildlife resources. Tom Philpott added in an email (echoed by this post) to me that while we should view USDA’s promises with skepticism, he’s cautiously hopeful all the public scrutiny of these decisions will at least somewhat improve USDA’s commitment to the environment and science.

“I think the ag lobby will be surprised by the amount of scrutiny on ag offsets,” he said. “They are used to operating in obscurity, and haven't fully adjusted to this new era of public interest. Meaning that people like you and me can play an important role as watchdogs as this thing develops.”

At the end of the day, that’s the conclusion we need to draw. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey’s policy mastery and skillful negotiating diminished the negative environmental impacts of the compromises that are necessary to build a majority behind real action to solve this great global crisis – but we’ll have to remain involved for years to make sure those negative consequences stay diminished.

UPDATE: Ben Geman at E & E has news of how the bill’s biomass and biodiesel provisions have been changed:

Related Links:

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Related Links:

What to make of the new climate poll

Bill McKibben says time is running out on climate delays

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

Just when America thought it was safe to go back into the grocery store, another food outbreak wakes us up to the fact that there is something seriously wrong with its food safety system. This time it's Nestle Toll House cookie dough with E.coli, a treat that nearly every kid in America reaches for a few times a month during the summer. This is yet another reminder why it’s important to get the new food safety legislation, currently winding its way through Congress, right.

Last week a new food safety bill passed unanimously out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and opinions vary widely on the current bill. Known as H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, the bill is being hailed as everything from as “the most sweeping reform of the food safety system in nearly 50 years” or the “totalitarian control of the food supply,” depending on what you read.

In addition to being supported by Consumers Union, the bill has also garnered the backing of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the American Meat Institute due to compromises committee chairman Henry Waxman ironed out during committee consideration.

Key compromises that brought industry giants on board were the reduction of an annual registration fee for food production facilities from $1,000 to $500, capping the amount any single company would have to pay for both foreign and domestic operations at $175,000 and exempting meat and poultry from oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The latter compromise was made to keep the bill from passing into the hands of the House Agricultural Committee, which would have likely gutted many key provisions of the bill.

Good, Bad and Caution

The current bill is an effort by Congress to revamp our nation’s dysfunctional food safety system, giving the FDA more regulatory power and resources to help stem the tide from the growing number of record food safety outbreaks in everything from lettuce, spinach, peanut butter and now cookie dough.

According to Consumers Union, the new food safety bill contains what they consider to be several steps in the right direction, including: inspection of high-risk food facilities at least every 6 to 12 months (FDA currently averages inspections one every 10 years), FDA recall authority, requirement of food facilities to register and pay an annual fee, and a traceability program.

Those more cautious about the bill include the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

In fact, the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund opposes the new food safety bill, citing among it’s chief concerns are that HR 2749 will “adversely impact small farms and food producers, without providing significant reforms in the industrial food system” and that it “does not address the underlying causes of food safety problems, including industrial agriculture practices and the consolidation of our food supply.”

The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is cautious, bringing up several good questions regarding definitions in the bill and how they will impact small farmers and processors. Russell Libby of MOFGA asks, "When is a farm a food processor that is a food ‘facility’ that warrants FDA regulation and oversight? When does a farm have enough potential impact on the food system to warrant FDA scrutiny?” Additionally, MOFGA states that "it oppose[s] laws that create barriers to entry for farmers and specialty food processors.”

For others who are skeptical of the bill, these remain “unanswered questions”.

What American Food Safety Needs Now is Reform

Even as the debate rages on about how the U.S. will create a new food safety system, with all of the attention focused on FDA’s failure to assure the safety of the food it regulates, a very quiet controversy is brewing at the USDA over the fact that the agency has yet to name an Under Secretary for the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

So far, the two leading candidates for the job, both with close ties to the food industry, have been knocked off track due to the efforts of a small collection of food safety advocates and a few advocacy groups who believe that food safety is not something that you should create a “Team of Rivals” around.

After watching the new administration’s efforts to select political appointees that conform to the plotline of a popular nonfiction book, it’s time to remind them why they won the election. Last year when Americans went to the polls in record numbers, they voted for change and the hope of reform.

What is becoming more evident every day is that while Republicans reward their base, Democrats kick their's to the curb.

As one food safety expert who has been leading the charge for food safety reform in Washington for over twenty years said recently, “It’s funny. When Republicans win the election I have to fight the meat industry and when Democrats win I have to fight the meat industry. When is somebody going to stand up for the American consumer?”

We couldn’t agree more.

If the Obama Administration is Serious About Food Safety – We Need a Reformer

Every year in the U.S. an estimated 76 million people get sick with foodborne illnesses and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One person who knows this fact better than almost anybody else in this country, is food safety lawyer Bill Marler.

Marler recently came to the public’s attention with his generous offer to pay for author Michael Pollan’s visit to Washington State University, after his book had been removed from the freshmen reading program. What many may not know is that he’s been known as a leading advocate for food safety for nearly two decades.

Marler first leapt to national prominence as the lead attorney in the famous 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak. Since that time, Marler has led the charge in protecting the rights of consumers against unsafe practices of major corporations. While dedicated to a high standard of food safety protocols, Marler is also pragmatic about the real economic need for food safety.

Poor food safety practices also have a major negative impact on the bottom line of business, costing U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion each year, which Marler believes could be better spent to keep America’s food supply truly safe.

Despite the food industry’s long contempt for personal injury attorneys, Marler could end up being their dream pick for the FSIS spot if they were willing to allow the motivated attorney to oversee the much needed change in food safety policies at the USDA.

Known as a fair but fierce opponent, Marler draws as much criticism from the industrial meat crowd as he does from proponents of local agriculture, with strong stances on the need for inspection and a concern on the growing interest in raw milk.

Why select Marler as the head of the FSIS? Because he’s a champion of citizen’s rights to safe food and he knows the system better than anyone. He’s also willing to balance the concerns of the meat industry and local foods at the same time.

If the Obama Administration is serious about reforming America’s food safety system, there really is only one choice – Bill Marler for FSIS. Now’s the time.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Photo: AP
We couldn’t let this photo of U.S. Reps Henry Waxman, John Dingell, and Ed Markey go unremarked (unreMarkeyed?)—so, caption ideas needed!  Submit them below in comments. Funniest idea gets a priceless Virtual High Five.

(With apologies to Eminem.)

Y’all act like you never seen a white person before
Jaws all on the floor like Lee Raymond just broke in the door
And started whoopin’ your ass worse than before
“This is just for the gas, pay me later for the war” (Ahh!)
It’s the revenge of the… “Ah, wait, no way, you’re kidding,
He didn’t just say what I think he did, did he?”
And Al Gore said… nothing you idiots!
Al Gore’s dead, he’s locked in my basement! (Ha-ha!)
Green young women love green young men
(chigga chigga chigga) “Hank Waxman, I’m sick of him
Look at him, walkin’ around grabbin’ his climate package
Oglin’ congressional pages, “Yeah, but he’s astute though!”
Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose
But no worse, than what’s goin’ on in your bankers’ HQ
Sometimes I wanna get on TV and just let loose, but can’t
But it’s cool for lumps of coal to sing Christmas carols
Our bill is on ya lap, our names is on ya lips
And if we be lucky, you might just tell it like it is
In between the eye-scratching and flinging cups of piss
No big mystery people don’t know what “cap-and-trade” is
But they do know about the warming and the oil biz
By the time they hit fourth grade
They got the Discovery Channel don’t they?
“Humans are the meanest mammals…” Well, some of us cannibals
Who cut other people open like cantaloupes {*SLURP*}
But if all we do is cry over endangered antelopes
We’ll be just another paragraph in the history of dead dopes
But if you feel like I feel, I got the antidote
Women wave ya pantyhose, sing the chorus and it goes

I’m Hank Waxman, and he’s Ed Markey
All you other wax Markeys are just imitating
So won’t the real green MC please stand up,
Please stand up, please stand up?

Related Links:

WWLD: What Would Lincoln Do?

Obama energy speech contained few policy specifics, but shaped forward-looking narrative

More anti-climate-bill letters forged under names of senior-citizen groups

...in Ireland.

This is great news for the people of Ireland. But we need to create those jobs in the U.S. too. In Ireland, a country of four million, 10,000 "green" jobs were created in the last three months in organic farming, energy efficient construction, electric cars, and other green industries. With US GDP falling by 1.6% in the first quarter of 2009 we need more action and investment from our government and the private sector. Passing effective climate and energy legislation this year will increase both public and private investment in a clean energy economy, creating new jobs and lifting America out of the recession.

The Waxman-Markey Act recently introduced in the House could be the right start, but it currently falls far short of what we need. An analysis by the Breakthrough Institute found that of the $1 trillion in cap and trade revenue between 2012-2025, only $9 billion a year will be invested in clean technology. “This $9 billion is far less than what Obama promised ($15 billion) and far less than the $30 billion that three dozen energy scientists and experts, including several Nobel laureates, called for in a sign-on letter during the fall of 2007.”

Strong climate legislation will also encourage investment from the private sector, giving American businesses the opportunity to compete in a global economy. Currently, only 6 of the top 30 companies in solar, wind, and advanced batteries are US companies.  We can do better. The recession is the perfect opportunity for forward-thinking businesses to invest and put America back on the path to prosperity. Let's hope we can print headlines here, like the one above, very soon.

Related Links:

Tom Friedman on “What They Really Believe”

Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

Why solar energy trumps coal power

The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

-----

Lately, every week is the most consequential in the history of climate change. This week was no exception. A House of Representatives committee slogged through its potentially game-changing climate bill. The White House struck a deal with auto manufacturers and California to raise fuel efficiency - and consequently reduce carbon emissions. Uneven signals from China promise hope for some kind of agreement but foreshadow a tough road to achieve it. These are all simultaneous episodes in a larger story of transformation.

The House at the Center of the World: The House of Representatives now sits at the epicenter. Rep. Henry Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee last Friday unveiled a full draft of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, cogently and quickly summarized by the Washington Post and Reuters. Democrats came to initial agreement on some of the thorniest issues, including how to allocate carbon credits to heavy polluters and other market participants, according to Greenwire. Among the major recipients of help, power companies will receive 35 percent of the allowances, natural gas distributors 9 percent, and energy-intensive, trade-sensitive industries 15 percent.

The committee is voting the bill Waxman co-sponsored with Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to the full House at this very writing. Through these minute-by-minute details, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture.

Jargon Watch: Now and then, a word or phrase escapes the rarified journals and policy discussions where it was born, and greets an unsuspecting public. Such is the case with "cap and trade," memorably deployed to mean "vague thing I'm supposed to understand but don't" by the New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd in a March column. ClimateWire has had fun with variations of it.

Whatever you call it, it's the centerpiece of the Waxman-Markey bill.

In the last week or two, commentators and columnists have taken to op-ed pages with arguments against cap-and-trade, for it, and, well, mostly against it. (Policy op-eds frequently challenge the dominant trend.) Remember that a national climate policy, be it cap-'n-trade, or a carbon tax, or Cap'n-America, is not an end in itself, but a way to help us help ourselves. Climate policy is designed to fix "the carbon problem" in our markets: Polluting is free but eventually could have seriously undesirable consequences.

What "cap-and-trade" means, and where it could carry us, hasn't yet penetrated the chatter. E&E News reported this week that "[O]verall support for cap and trade trails far behind backing for increased investment in renewable energy, improved fuel efficiency for vehicles, implementation of a renewable electricity standard and even increased offshore drilling." A cap and trade system is supposed to nudge the market toward increasing demand for new energy sources. Climate policy is a lever that increases investment in renewables, fuel efficiency, and may or may not affect the economics of oil drilling at home. The relationship between a national climate policy and these desirable goals isn't "either-or" but "if-then."

White House firing on all cylinders (now with greater efficiency): While the Energy and Commerce Committee worked over the Waxman-Markey bill, the administration announced the first major climate rule in U.S. history. Much to the administration's delight, no one leaked news about new auto fuel efficiency standards before President Barack Obama's announcement on Tuesday. That means official sources were willing to play along, as reporters captured rich chronologies (called "tick-tock" in the biz) of the secret negotiations, particularly the Los Angeles Times (LAT) and ClimateWire. The LAT pins down insider details, such as Ford's 3 p.m. Sunday call to the White House saying the deal was off, and the subsequent impromptu cell-phone negotiations, with participants phoning from the bathroom at a Washington National's game and a birthday party in New York. The new Corporate Auto Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules will establish a nationwide standard by 2016 that should reduce carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. cars and light-trucks by 30 percent.

Scaling the Great Wall that divides us: Secret negotiations were a motif this week. U.S. and Chinese negotiators began meeting last July trying to bridge their differences on emissions reductions, symbolically at the Great Wall. The Guardian broke news of the meetings on Monday, reporting that senior Bush administration advisers and several current Obama advisers met with Chinese officials. The back-channel talks led in March to an unsigned memorandum of understanding, which participants hope will embolden the world's two largest national emitters to find a common ground in addressing the causes of climate change. The news comes at a time when the international climate community is gearing up for negotiations in December in Copenhagen.

Obama on Monday picked Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as his ambassador to China. A savvy selection, Huntsman is an up-and-comer in the Republican party, has served as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, and speaks fluent Mandarin. The Nicholas Institute, which operates The Climate Post, has conducted modeling studies of Utah's policy options on climate change, under Huntsman's administration. Obama has indicated he expects climate change to hold a prominent spot in Huntsman's portfolio.

Talks between developed and developing nations will continue to shape international climate politics (witness the Indo-Asian News Service's interest in an amendment to a bill moving through a House committee). The secret talks reported by the Guardian are only one item of interest in a complicated U.S.-Chinese relationship. Chinese officials confirmed for the Alliance France Presse earlier today their negotiating position for the end-of-the-year Copenhagen talks: China will ask that industrialized nations commit to emissions targets 40 percent below the amount they emitted in 1990 by 2020. The European Union has resigned itself to 20 percent reductions, and the House climate bill would reduce pollution 20 percent below 2005 levels.

Any unified global action must consider and guide international trade. The Washington Post showed just how complicated these relationships can be, in a front-page story Monday about the rise of China as a car-maker. Chinese companies have grown quickly, which means that their firms lack the technical expertise that can only emerge with time. "What they still lack is... being able to design new vehicles from scratch and get them to a manufacturing line," Kelly Sims Gallagher of Harvard's Kennedy School told the Post. A probable result: Chinese firms will try and buy ailing U.S. car companies - and their valuable human capital. Don't miss Business Week's in-depth package on greening China.

Reporting? We don't need no stinkin' reporting!: Fortune magazine recently held its second Brainstorm Green conference, a star-studded event that brought together luminaries from the politics and business worlds. But editors undermined their expertise in climate issues - in business, politics, policy, and science - by publishing an article lacking the rigor and seriousness characteristic to the publication.

"What if global warming fears are overblown?" - the headline - is an important question to ask. Climate fears might be overblown. They are more likely "underblown." But the risk of climate change - the consequences of catastrophic change times its probability - is serious enough to prompt global and quick action, a point the article fails to make. Instead, a financial writer, Jon Birger, asks "softball" questions of a University of Alabama, Huntsville, scientist, whose skepticism about the potential for severe global warming is out of step with the work of scientists who have re-examined his work in peer-reviewed journals (here, for example). It's not as obviously wrong as reporting in 2009 that, say, Sadaam Hussein currently has weapons of mass destruction (after he was both revealed not to and publicly hanged). But it's a problem that Birger and Fortune's piece is not obviously wrong, particularly to Fortune editors who should know better if Brainstorm Green means anything. Climate science is a vast body of physical, evidence, assembled by thousands of people, worldwide, over several decades. Putting eight questions to a scientist whose ideas were challenged professionally at least four years ago fails to communicate the preponderance of evidence that is driving the world to reduce the (rising) climate risk.

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

The transition to clean energy, reducing our dependence on dangerous foreign oil and protecting our environment will cost less than some would have you think.

In April, the EPA estimated that the American Clean Energy and Security Act would cost households less than the cost of a postage stamp each day, roughly $100-$140 per year. Since then, the EPA estimates the changes to the bill will reduce the cost of allowances by 10%, which will in turn lower the actual cost to households.

The EPA is not alone in forecasting only nominal impacts from the bill. Numerous academic and government studies have found that climate legislation has a nearly indistinguishable impact on GDP.

So what to make of predictions that climate legislation will have devastating impacts on U.S. businesses and the economy? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce compares regulating global warming pollution to "suicide bombing the American economy." The Heritage Foundation makes its own doom and gloom claims, saying the American Clean Energy and Security Act "promises job losses" and "income cuts." (Rebuttals to several such economic forecasts can be found at ww.CO2MediaGuide.org.)

But have such predictions been borne out in the past? With decades of environmental regulation and cost data behind us, a number of experts have asked and answered this question. As Frank Ackerman of Tufts University summarizes in his paper "The Unbearable Lightness of Regulatory Costs,"

"The evidence is clear: the costs of environmental protection are much more often overestimated, rather than underestimated, in advance...One study found that compliance costs for environmental regulations were overestimated in advance in 11 out of 12 cases (Hodges 1997). Another study found that advance cost estimates for environmental compliance turned out to be more than 25 percent too high in 14 out of 28 cases, while they were more than 25 percent too low in only 3 of the 28 cases (Harrington et al. 2000). A study for Environment Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology, focusing specifically on the costs of controlling chlorinated substances, confirmed that overestimation of regulatory costs is more common than underestimation (Cheminfo Services 2000)." [emphasis added] 

Environmental Defense Fund presents some clear examples in a 2007 letter to Congress:

A 1997 Economic Policy Institute report detailed a number of cases where environmental regulations were overestimated. The average overestimate on this list is 600%:

It isn't that surprising that despite thirty years of claims about economic doom and gloom being proven false, industry and opponents of climate legislation continue to trot such claims out. What is surprising is anyone listens to them anymore.

[Original post at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/a_quick_survey_of_exaggerated.html]

Related Links:

A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

Support for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is coming in from a broad and diverse range of constituencies, including businesses, unions, elected officials, environmental groups, organizations representing low-income Americans and people of faith and coalitions combining some of those constituencies.

Here are excerpts from letters that have been sent to the Energy and Commerce Committee, most of which are posted on the committee website. 

Dow: "We support your aim to move the bill through the Committee, and we look forward to working with you and others in Congress as this legislation is further considered."

Exelon: "We may be on the brink of something astounding in Washington. This is due to the hard work and political courage of President Obama, Chairmen Waxman and Markey, Congressman Boucher, Senator Bingaman and many others."

GE: "On behalf of GE, I would like to offer my support for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The bill represents a strong step toward an energy policy for the United States that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, set us on a path to a more secure energy and economic future, and make the United States the world's technology leader in energy."

United Auto Workers (UAW): "The UAW generally supports H.R. 2454 and urges Members of the Committee to vote to favorably report this measure."

FPL Group: "We are encouraged by all of the recent progress that has been made on the bill, and as such, we support moving it through the committee process and onto the House floor. It is vital that legislation pass this year."

Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA): "We feel the time to act is now and the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) provides a road map of federal policies to move our country toward building a clean energy economy - an economy that both combats global warming and creates millions of good paying jobs." 

PG&E: "We believe that the ACESA includes many of the key provisions and concepts listed above, to varying degrees, and we encourage you to support moving the legislation out of Committee."

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Our estimate is that setting aside 15 percent of the allowance value for refunds and tax credits for consumers, together with other provisions in the bill setting aside free allowances that the companies receiving them must use for consumer relief, would ensure that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the population would not experience any reduction in the purchasing power of its budget. We strongly commend you for including this protection for low-income households in your legislation, which we hope the Energy and Commerce Committee will approve."

United States Climate Action Partnership: "USCAP believes the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA) broadly embraces the approach recommended in the USCAP Blueprint for Legislative Action that we issued in January 2009. While not every USCAP recommendation is contained in ACESA, USCAP urges the full Committee to advance the bill so Congress can continue to build on the progress made by the Committee thus far."

Clean Energy Group (The Clean Energy Group is composed of Austin Energy, Avista Corporation, Calpine Corporation, Constellation Energy Group, Entergy Corporation, Exelon Corporation, FPL Group, Inc., National Grid, PG&E Corporation, Public Service Enterprise Group Seattle City Light):  "We look forward to reviewing the imminent legislative language and hope that the Committee moves swiftly and constructively to advance a bill as a first step toward enacting a national climate change program this year."

Blue-Green Alliance (United Steelworkers, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Communications Workers of America, Service Employees Union International, Laborers International Union of North America): "As the nation continues to face high unemployment and the threat of climate change, Chairmen Waxman and Markey have shown true leadership on this critical issue. . . Passing comprehensive climate legislation is a critical step forward. The Blue Green Alliance looks forward to working with Congress to make certain that the provisions in this legislation ensure the creation of millions of good, family-sustaining green jobs in the United States and the protection of public health and the environment for future generations." 

Climate Communities (representing elected officials from Sacramento County, CA; King County, WA; Tacoma, WA; Snohomish County, WA; Montgomery County, MD; Monmouth County, NJ; Sonoma County, CA; Story County, IA; Dubuque, IA; Dane County, WI; New Kent County, VA; Burlington, VT; King County, WA; Stamford, CT; Loudoun County, VA; Washtenaw County, MI; Snohomish County, WA; Savannah, GA; Nassau County, NY; James City County, VA; Annapolis, MD; Santa Monica, CA; Santa Ana, CA; Miami-Dade County, FL):

"On behalf of the hundreds of local governments across America working with the Climate Communities coalition to support national action on climate change, we write to convey our support for the passage of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACES) as a strong first step on the path to climate legislation. Local governments are ready to play our part in meeting the climate challenge and creating a clean energy economy, and this legislation will create real incentives for progress and innovation in both the public and private sectors."

Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America: "The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the nation's largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization, is pleased that based on our discussions with the Chairman Waxman, Subcommittee Chairman Markey and other key offices, the legislation includes non-profits and houses of worship in this retrofit program and we applaud Reps. Waxman and Markey for this important clarification."

Audubon: "The National Audubon Society strongly urges you to support the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454)."

NRDC: "I urge you to vote in favor of reporting the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) during this week's markup in the Energy and Commerce Committee. This legislation will create clean energy jobs, reduce our dangerous dependence on oil, and finally limit the carbon pollution that causes global warming."

American Rivers, Audubon, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Clean Water Action, Climate Solutions, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Environment America, League of Conservation Voters, League of Women Voters of the United States, National Parks Conservation Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, Pew Environment Group, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Union of Concerned Scientists, World Wildlife Fund:

"On behalf of the millions of people we represent, we urge you to strengthen and support the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), which sets us on the path toward creating clean energy jobs, reducing our dangerous dependence on oil, and cutting the carbon pollution that causes global warming. This committee vote is the most important in decades, and we hope you will do all that you can to strengthen and pass this legislation."

National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA): "Climate change will severely impact the operations of these utilities, which is why we strongly support comprehensive legislation to mitigate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall approach taken in the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES)."

(NOTE: These are excerpts. If you want to know all the details of where any organization stands on the bill, read their entire letter.)

[Original post at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/broad_and_diverse_support_for.html]

Related Links:

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee kicked off debate of the Waxman-Markey climate bill on Monday, beginning what will likely be a grueling week of work to get the bill through the key panel before Memorial Day.

"I think members ought to be prepared to work late every single night," Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said after opening statements wrapped up Monday afternoon.

Waxman and co-author Ed Markey (D-Mass.) released the latest draft of the bill (PDF) late Monday afternoon. Committee members offered opening statements on Monday, and the process of offering amendments is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

The new draft weighs in at 946 pages, which has prompted some griping from Republicans that they haven't had sufficient time to review it. There was some fear (especially on the part of reporters who have to cover this stuff, ahem) that Republicans would force a reading of the legislation's full text before the committee proceeded to debate. While the minority waived that option, they have pledged to offer hundreds of amendments this week.

Delay of game

Estimates of just how many changes to the climate bill the GOP members plan to offer run as high as 449, according to a list (PDF) that has been passed around Capitol Hill. The list includes amendments that would allow individual states to opt out of the cap-and-trade program altogether, and another that would call the whole thing off should certain states lose 1,000 jobs due to restrictions on carbon emissions. Another proposed amendment would lower the 2020 emission-reduction targets.

The committee's top Republican and one of the most vocal climate change skeptics in the House, Joe Barton of Texas, is also planning to introduce a competing bill that would essentially defang the Waxman-Markey proposal by removing the cap-and-trade provision and letting preexisting coal-fired power plants off the hook for their emissions. It would also repeal the Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that acknowledged the EPA's right to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and would take away the right of states to set their own emissions standards. The bulk of Barton's proposal focuses on ramping up production of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power.

Fred Upton (Mich.), another senior GOP member of the committee, said Republicans planned to meet Monday night to prioritize their amendments. Upton said that he believes a number of Republicans on the committee could support the bill if they took out the cap-and-trade component, which of course would make it unappealing for the majority of Democrats on the panel.

Since Upton and other Republicans probably aren't going to be able to torpedo the cap-and-trade portion, they hope to convince some moderate Democrats on the panel to support changes to weaken it.

"I'd like to think there could be a number of Democrats who could support these," said Upton. "We'll see if we can't influence this with some amendments."

Dems holding firm

But Democrats – even the moderates – seem to be on board with the bill as is, after Waxman and Markey agonized over the specifics for three weeks before finally announcing a deal late last week. The authors have even managed to win over some Democrats who were expected to oppose a comprehensive climate deal. Coal cheerleader Rick Boucher (D-Va.) said last week that he is on board. And John Dingell (D-Michigan), a key ally of the auto industry, said on Monday, "This is a good bill; I intend to support it."

There are likely to be some amendments from Democrats, including one from Dingell that would create a Clean Energy Investment Bank to provide loans for research and development of new technologies. Other Democrats have indicated that they may introduce amendments to support additional mandates for automobile technologies and funding for international adaptation.

But it appears at this point that the Dems are united in a desire to pass the bill out of committee, and aren't going to take Republican bait. "The amendments they'll be offering will be designed to obstruct. I will resist those amendments," Boucher told E&E last week. "I will ask them be defeated, as will Chairman Waxman."

That doesn't mean that Republicans aren't going to try to drag this out as long as possible.

"Bring a sleeping bag," warned Barton at the close of Monday's meeting.

Related Links:

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

What to make of the new climate poll

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Barack Obama praised Democratic Congressional leaders for their breakthrough on climate and energy legislation as a "promising sign of progress" on a top issue for his administration."

"Chairman Henry Waxman and members of the Energy and Commerce Committee brought together stakeholders from all corners of the country – and every sector of our economy – to reach an historic agreement on comprehensive energy legislation," said Obama.

"Longtime opponents are sitting together, at the same table, to help solve one of America’s most serious challenges," he continued."For the first time, utility companies and corporate leaders are joining, not opposing, environmental advocates and labor leaders to create a new system of clean energy initiatives that will help unleash a new era of growth and prosperity."

He also praised the bill itself, which he said will "reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and cap the carbon pollution that threatens our health and our climate," and will create "millions of new jobs for Americans.

"This we know: the nation that leads in 21st century clean energy is the nation that will lead the 21st century global economy," said Obama. "America can and must be that nation – and this agreement is a major step toward this goal."

Watch the YouTube of his address:

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Democrats in the House have come close to agreement on a sweeping climate and energy bill. It's weaker than the original version, but backers say it has enough support to pass.

"We have resolved a good number of the issues," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told reporters after a meeting of committee Democrats Tuesday night. "I believe we'll have the votes for passage."

Waxman and bill cosponsor Ed Markey (D-Mass.) had to wheel and deal to get the support of moderate Democrats from the South and Midwest, who had lots of concerns about the original draft. Some of the Dems may still vote against the bill, but Waxman believes enough of them are on board to move forward.

President Barack Obama praised the deal and Waxman's work during a summit on health-care reform on Wednesday. "I want to take a moment, before I start talking about health care, just to congratulate Chairman Waxman and the Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats, who've made such extraordinary progress in reaching a deal on comprehensive energy reform and climate legislation. This is a major step forward in building the kind of clean energy economy that will reduce America's dependence on foreign oil."

Waxman plans to release the full text of the revised bill on Thursday. Next week, the Energy and Environment Subcommittee and then the full Energy and Commerce Committee will begin offering and debating amendments, with the aim of passing the bill by Friday May 22, before the Memorial Day recess.

Republicans on the committee -- none of whom are expected to support the bill -- will do what they can to slow down and derail the process by offering dozens or even hundreds of amendments. "Bring your NoDoz Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday," said Rep. Fred Upton (Mich.), the ranking Republicans on the Energy and Environment Subcommittee. "Lots of coffee."

Meanwhile, interest groups across the spectrum will be making a full-court press to change the bill to their liking.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

The revised text of the bill is not yet available, but some notable changes have been announced.

Near-term emissions reductions: The bill now calls for greenhouse-gas emissions to be cut 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, down from 20 percent in the original draft (but higher than the 6 percent some moderate Dems wanted). The longer-term targets remain intact -- 45 percent cuts by 2030 and 85 percent by 2050.

Renewable electricity standard: The RES now requires 20 percent of electricity to be produced from renewable sources by 2020, with up to 5 percent of that coming from efficiency improvements. The draft bill called for an RES of 25 percent by 2025. More flexibility has also been built into the RES: If a state determines that it cannot meet the renewable target, it can increase the efficiency component to 8 percent and produce just 12 percent of its power from renewables. This change is meant to allay concerns of many southeastern Democrats that their states don't have the renewable resources to meet a higher target.

"The revisions which are being made to the RES appropriately recognize regional differences by making necessary improvements to expand the list of qualifying fuels and to lower the alternative compliance payment," said Rick Boucher (D-Va.), one of the committee members who took issue with the original RES proposal. "With these vital changes, I believe that we have created a balanced and responsible policy to advance deployment of renewable electricity, and I am pleased with the product we are able to put forward on this issue."

Pollution permits: The bill would hand out the majority of emission permits free of charge, rather than making industrial polluters purchase them at auction. The original draft of the bill didn't specify how permits would be distributed.

Under the current deal, 35 percent of the total allowances under the cap would be given to local electricity distribution companies in the initial years of the program. It's not yet when and how those free allocations would scale down. Energy-intensive industries like steel, cement, and paper manufacturers would get 15 percent of the permits until 2025. At that point, the president would determine whether those free allowances were still needed.

"We’ve worked hard to develop legislation that will dramatically reduce CO2 emissions while preserving energy-intensive U.S. manufacturing jobs and protecting consumers from substantially higher electric bills -- and I believe that the agreement we’ve reached will do just that,” said Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), who worked with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) to develop the compromise language on permit allocation.

It's also not yet clear how many -- if any -- credits would be distributed to petroleum and natural-gas refiners, though estimates range from 1 to 5 percent. As of Wednesday night, it appeared that the bill's authors were still negotiating with two Texas Democrats, Gene Green and Charlie Gonzalez, on this issue.

Another deal made to please moderates, particularly John Dingell (D-Mich.), stipulates that the automobile industry would receive 3 percent of permits between 2012 and 2017, scaling back to 1 percent through 2025. The allowances will help "spur more innovations and new, green job creation here at home," Dingell said on Wednesday.

Preliminary reactions

Many interest groups are waiting to see the final bill in its entirety before offering up their reviews. But both greens and industry reps have indicated that the changes they've heard about so far don't satisfy them, and they're gearing up to try to influence the bill as it moves forward.

Sierra Club: "Chairmen Waxman and Markey have done heroic work in reaching agreement on the Energy and Commerce Committee around a comprehensive clean energy and climate plan, a critically important milestone that has faced seemingly insuperable obstacles," Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said in a statement. But he continued, "It is clear that Big Oil, Big Coal and other polluters are still holding out for a congressional bailout. They will continue to try to riddle this legislation with loopholes, water it down, and load it up with hundreds of billions of dollars in giveaways."

National Wildlife Federation: Joe Mendelson, NWF's director of global warming policy, said his group will push for improvements, but praised the process so far. "We understand that there are some deals that are cut, but ... the House has hammered out this agreement and is ready to move forward and actually pass climate legislation, which is monumental."

Greenpeace: Damon Moglen, Greenpeace's director of global warming programs, expressed concern that the bill has been watered down during the negotiating process -- and his group had already criticized the earlier draft for being too lenient.

Greenpeace is particularly unhappy about the lowering of near-term emission targets. "The goals need to be based on science and not on some political calculation about what industry lobbyists will accept and what they won't accept," said Moglen. "We are really worried if those goals are not taken seriously, and if the legislation doesn't track the necessary, scientifically mandated goals, the legislation really could not serve their purpose."

Moglen also pointed out that a weaker bill could hamper negotiations toward a new global climate treaty, which is supposed to be hashed out by the end of this year. "There is a real risk, if what is put forward is very weak ... then we can see those negotiations starting at the floor and not the ceiling," he said. "If the U.S. policy sets an inadequate series of goals and processes in place, those could become global."

Environmental Defense Fund: EDF has been more positive about the deal-making. The group is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of business and environmental groups whose blueprint for climate legislation formed the basis of the bill.

"To see a committee as diverse as Energy and Commerce get as close to actually producing legislation is really quite remarkable," said Steve Cochran, director of EDF's National Climate Campaign. "It does look like Mr. Markey and Mr. Waxman have broken the lock here."

Cochran said that because many of moderates' biggest concerns have been addressed, the bill has a better chance of passing through the committee, the full House, and ultimately the Senate, where climate policy in thought to be a tougher sell.

Duke Energy Corp.: A spokesperson for Duke, one of the key industry players in USCAP, said the company is waiting to see the full bill before offering an opinion. But Duke CEO Jim Rogers is now appearing in television ads sponsored by EDF that call for passage of a climate bill this year.

Electric Reliability Coordinating Council: Scott Segal, director of the ERCC, which lobbies on behalf of power companies, was less enthusiastic. He said it's unclear whether the near-term targets will allow enough time for companies to get new technologies in place to curb emissions. He has called for the bill to include a so-called safety valve, which would effectively put a ceiling on the cost of emission permits, and for more flexibility on the use of offsets.

"While I think that a lot of the changes in the legislation from a cost perspective constitute steps in the right direction, it's a little premature to say there's a deal," said Segal.

He also worries that the one-week schedule for markup of the bill is too tight. "I hope even with a truncated schedule like this there will be time to air all of these issues," said Segal. "If there isn't enough time, then the bill will be weaker for it."

But Segal does think Waxman is serious about sticking to his self-imposed Memorial Day deadline. "He has a reputation for determination, and I suspect that if he has to do 24-hour-a-day markups, he'll do it, to get it done."

Related Links:

What to make of the new climate poll

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

House leaders have reportedly reached a tentative deal on a climate and energy bill -- and in the absence of details, speculation is rampant about how the bill has been weakened or otherwise changed.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the bill's coauthors, had wanted to start markup of the legislation two weeks ago, with the aim of passing it out of committee by Memorial Day. But it's taken longer than expected to reach agreement with moderate Democrats, who requested a lot of changes to the bill.

Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee are scheduled to meet Tuesday night to hammer out the final details; then text of the revised bill is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday, and debate is to begin on Thursday.

While the bill's authors have been mum about the negotiations, their moderate counterparts have made a number of claims about what will be in the bill.

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) told Reuters late last week that the bill would give away the majority of carbon permits for "the first 10 to 15 years," rather than requiring emitters to pay for the right to pollute. Doyle and others have indicated that local electricity distribution companies would be given 35 to 40 percent of the permits, while roughly 15 percent would go to trade-exposed, energy-intensive industries like steel, paper, and cement, and up to 5 percent would go to refineries.

Informed sources on the Hill tell Grist that Doyle may be jumping the gun in claiming those decisions are final. But there is a lot of pressure from utilities, energy-intensive industries, and their sympathetic representatives to hand out a majority of the permits free of charge in the early years of the program. Waxman has acknowledged that to get the bill passed, some free permit allocations may be necessary, and would be reduced over time.

The near-term target for cutting emissions may be lowered in the new version of the bill, to 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The original proposal called for a 20 percent cut, but some were lobbying to go as low as 6 percent. Waxman balked at the 6 percent suggestion: "I think it is very low," he told reporters several weeks ago.

The 14 percent cut is at the low end of what the U.S. Climate Action Partnership proposed in its blueprint, which served as a model for the Waxman-Markey bill.

The target for cutting emissions by 2050 is likely to remain as it was in the original draft: 83 percent below 2005 levels.

The bill's renewable electricity standard is another component that may be weakened. The draft called for 25 percent of each state's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025. Southeastern Democrats were unhappy with that, so committee leaders are reportedly considering lowering the mandate to 17.5 percent, and could allow a portion of that to be met by efficiency measures.

Drill, maybe, drill?

Another bargaining chip with moderate Democrats might be offshore oil and gas drilling.

The Democratic-controlled Congress let the moratorium on offshore drilling expire last October, responding to public outrage over $4-a-gallon gasoline and the Republicans' "drill, baby, drill" chant. (Never mind that experts agree that more domestic drilling wouldn't do anything to lower oil costs in the near term.) Obama changed his tune on the issue while campaigning last year, saying he'd be open to more offshore drilling if it were part of a comprehensive energy plan.

Now the White House is floating the possibility of a "grand bargain" that would lump some expanded domestic oil and gas drilling in with broader climate and energy policy. A senior White House official told The New Yorker that the administration was exploring a deal that would include a cap-and-trade system and "serious" and "short-term" increases in domestic oil production in places like the California coastal region. House Democrats who met with Obama in the White House last week said the subject came up.

It's a plan that many enviros -- and many Californians -- wouldn't be too fond of, but it could bring moderate Democrats on board. It would also defuse the Republican talking point that Democrats are opposed to all drilling.

Such a deal could also help put in place new protections for the coasts. Now, in the absence of an offshore-drilling moratorium, the federal government could technically offer drilling leases for areas as near as three miles to shore. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar scrapped the Bush administration's lease plan in January, but said the Obama administration is open to drilling in some areas and would work with Congress to craft "a plan that makes sense."

The offshore-drilling issue would be handled by the House Natural Resources Committee, however, not the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is working on the climate bill, so additional deal-making would be needed to get everything into a single package.

Through all this, Waxman is sticking to his self-imposed deadline for passing the climate and energy bill out of committee before Congress leaves for its Memorial Day recess, but that's looking less and less likely as the holiday approaches.

Related Links:

What to make of the new climate poll

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

The sponsors of the House climate and energy bill were supposed to release the final text of their legislation and open it up for debate this week, but the process has stalled out.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have been trying to come to agreement with moderates on the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, who have balked at elements of the bill.

Waxman on Tuesday indicated that rather than trying to get the bill passed through subcommittee, he and Markey may fast-track it and skip to a full vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee. "I'm still holding firm on my deadline to get a bill out of committee by the end of May and I believe that will probably require us to go right to the full committee and bypass the subcommittee," Waxman told reporters.

But he later issued a statement saying they haven't yet decided how to proceed. "No final decisions on process have been made. I am consulting with members of the Energy & Commerce Committee about the best way forward to ensure that we report a comprehensive clean energy bill by the Memorial Day recess," Waxman said in the statement.

Markey spokesperson Dan Reilly confirmed to Grist that they have not yet determined the best path forward. "All options are on the table," he said. "We're continuing to have constructive and productive discussions with all members."

About a dozen Democratic members of the committee met at the White House with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday to discuss the climate bill and other issues on the committee's plate. Obama encouraged them to reach consensus on the bill.

Said Waxman afterward, "We're working out these issues because we want to be together and we want to succeed in getting this legislation through."

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

President Barack Obama is inviting key House Democrats to the White House on Tuesday to discuss the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, as well as health care and other issues.  Obama is expected to encourage the Democrats -- many of whom have expressed concerns about the climate bill -- to come to consensus around it.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) -- who lead the Energy and Commerce Commitee and the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, respectively -- are currently negotiating with moderate Democratic committee members to get support for the bill.  They plan to start debating and amending the legislation in subcommittee this week, with the aim of passing it out of the full committee by Memorial Day -- just three weeks away. 

Obama has called on Congress repeatedly to deliver a climate bill to him this year, affirming in his March press conference, "We’ll get it done. And I will sign it." During his Earth Day trip to an Iowa wind-turbine manufacturing plant, he praised the draft bill from Waxman and Markey. "My hope is that this will be the vehicle through which we put this policy in effect," Obama said.

Still, some liberal members of Congress and environmentalists think the president hasn't done enough so far to support the legislation, and last week started calling for him to get involved.

This Saturday Night Live sketch might provide insight into what Tuesday's meeting will look like:

Related Links:

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Most of the news coverage in recent days, understandably has focused on the Markey climate hearings and speculation about when his subcommittee will actually start voting.  And now there is scrutiny of efforts by "moderate" House Democrats to gut the Waxman-Markey bill on behalf of Duke Energy, the Edison Electric Institute and other forces of darkness who assert with a straight face that "the consumer" is their only concern.

Across the Capitol, however, another important mini-drama is playing out. There, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has recommended approval of the very qualified Gina McCarthy, the environmental commissioner from Connecticut, to become head of the U.S. EPA air pollution control division. 

But two Republicans, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, have said they'll try to "hold" the McCarthy nomination -- preventing a formal vote by the full Senate. The reason?  They don't like EPA's proposed "endangerment" finding (that greenhouse gases pose a threat to health and the environment.)

The Senate leadership ought to put a quick stop to this nonsense.  It's one thing for them to sit back and watch their House colleagues agonize over the climate bill. 

But the EPA can't function properly without having someone in charge of the air division.  We still have a huge air pollution problem, as the American Lung Association noted this week in its annual "State of the Air" report. McCarthy was a good choice, and she ought to be permitted to do her job.  And the way the special interests are mobilizing to undermine the very good intentions of Congressmen Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, we're going to need the best minds possible at EPA to make some progress on climate as well as "conventional" air pollutants like smog, soot and mercury.

Related Links:

China, India, US Commit to Seal Copenhagen Deal

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

Inhofe to Boxer: “We Won, You Lost, Now Get a Life!”

Certainly the weakest part of Waxman-Markey is the 2 billion rip-offsets that polluters are allowed to purchase each year in place of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions.  After all, total U.S. GHGs in 2005 were about 7.2 billion tons.

Rip-offsets deserve to be called rip-offsets because it is far from clear how many of them represent real reductions (see discussion at “NRDC and EDF endorse the weak, coal-friendly, rip-offset-heavy USCAP climate plan” and below).

The good news in Waxman-Markey is you apparently have to purchase 5 tons of offsets to substitute for 4 tons of actual emissions reductions and you can’t get international offsets from a country that has not agreed to reduce its emissions — which together are vast improvements over the USCAP proposal.  Also, Waxman-Markey would in theory let EPA set tough standards for domestic rip-offsets.  How tough those would be in practice is anyone guess.

Certainly 2 billion is way too many, but rather than trying to rewrite the bill to sharply reduce those in the early years, which seems unlikely to be a successful negotiating strategy, I’d just suggest that progressives in Congress (and elsewhere), push to sunset the offsets.

After all, two main purposes of the rip-offsets are to:

Now if you don’t motivate polluters to change, you end up with the inaction of the coal industry — as typified by Jim Rogers in his interview on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

A decade ago the coal industry said “don’t regulate us, give us a decade to develop sequestration and other clean technologies.”  Well, they never seriously invested in sequestration and they refuse to adopt the many clean technologies that have been developed, as Rogers made crystal clear [see "Like Detroit, the coal industry chooses (assisted) suicide" and Bush wanted to destroy the future of coal as much as the industry did, Futuregen was “nothing more than a public relations ploy,” House study finds].

Now I see two basic sunset strategies.

The one I’d recommend is to sunset the offsets by 2030 with a steady decrease starting in 2012, allowing, say, 1 billion in 2020.  Another possibility that is weaker but probably more politically palatable is to apply the same reduction to the offsets that you are applying to emissions in the bill:

This, with the emissions targets in the bill, sends a strong signal that business as usual is over.  And I’d keep the 5 for 4 exchange ratio.  And I still certainly wouldn’t let any country without a cap have access to the international offsets, particularly China — with the one exception being certified, national accounting-based strategies to reduce deforestation.

Since I haven’t seriously dissed rip-offsets in over three months, let me repeat once more, as a major 2008 analysis from Stanford found

… “between a third and two thirds” of emission offsets under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — set up under the Kyoto treaty to encourage emissions reductions in developing nations — do not represent actual emission cuts.

And this led to the study’s stark conclusion:

… any offset market of sufficient scale to provide substantial cost-control for a cap-and-trade program will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions.

The Government Accountability Office recently ripped rip-offsets: “The use of carbon offsets in a cap-and-trade system can undermine the system’s integrity.”

Also, the CDM is filled with fraud (see “You can call a rip-offset a CDM project, but it’s still a rip-offset“). Let’s remember that the West got suckered into giving China some $6 billion to destroy greenhouse gas refrigerants that probably cost Chinese companies $100 million to capture and destroy (for more details, see “Kyoto’s Great Carbon Offset Swindle“). Let’s remember that

U.N. regulators are also concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value….

In a presentation to U.N. officials last fall, the head of Tüv Süd’s carbon business told U.N. officials that the quality of projects the auditors are receiving from carbon brokers is “going down,” according to the U.N. panel’s Mr. Schmidt, who was at the meeting….

“There is a high incentive” for companies to put together environmentally questionable carbon-credit projects, “because there is a lot of money that can be earned,” he said. “People are getting more inventive, so it’s getting harder to detect the black sheep.”

Let’s remember that instead of using the money to fund the transition to a sustainable economy, the World Bank “has loaned $1.5 billion to fossil-fuel companies to make minor greenhouse-gas reductions,” and “then sells carbon credits for those reductions,” and “takes its 13 percent cut”?

Let’s remember that “The vast majority of schemes that sell carbon credits to offset pollution are delivering 30% less than they promise“?

Now, the EPA can you probably weed out the worst of the domestic rip-offsets (as long as the agency is run by people who actually care about science and averting catastrophic climate impacts).  And for now, Waxman-Markey doesn’t buy into CDM.

So if we were to combine those Waxman-Markey offset provisions with sunsetting, then the bill would be much more palatable.

And, besides, aren’t sunsets beautiful?

UPDATE: Victor Flatt, Professor of Environmental Law, University of Houston Law Center, has an important related post: “Proposed Amendments to Waxman-Markey Could Diminish Integrity of Offset Provisions.”

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Related Links:

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

Make the kids pay: The economic effects of climate change on future generations

WWLD: What Would Lincoln Do?

As the House begins serious debate on a climate bill, the biggest sticking point is shaping up to be how much it will cost average Americans.

The Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday started four straight days of hearings on the draft climate bill sponsored by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The legislation would create a cap-and-trade plan that aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050. Waxman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) want the bill passed out of committee by Memorial Day -- just five weeks away -- and approved by the full House by July.

The EPA estimated on Tuesday that the bill would cost the average U.S. household $98 to $140 a year, or 27 cents to 38 cents a day. But that didn't stop some Republicans from claiming the bill would wring Americans dry.

The committee's lead Republican, Joe Barton (R-Texas), wasn't present for the opening hearing, but he issued an advance copy of his remarks for Wednesday, in which he repeats the (now thoroughly debunked) estimate that a cap-and-trade plan would cost households more than $3,100 per year. He lambasts the Waxman-Markey bill as an "energy tax" and suggests that it would force Americans back to an 1875 standard of living.

For the most part, Barton's statement shies away from the outright climate change skepticism he's voiced at other hearings, focusing instead on the argument that the bill will be too costly.

Other Republican committee members couldn't repress their skepticism on Tuesday. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) said he believes "the debate on the causes of climate change is still happening." Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) also questioned the "underlying science" of the Waxman-Markey bill. She warned that the pending EPA regulation of greenhouse gases is "like a gun to our heads," but said the bill being discussed is like "taking it and shooting ourselves in the chest."

Let's play ball

Tuesday's hearing, at which committee members offered opening statements, was the equivalent of the ceremonial opening pitch at a baseball game -- all show, no impact. But it indicated that getting the committee to sign off on the bill will be far from easy.

The real action starts on Wednesday, when EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will kick off a parade of high-profile witnesses. Testimony from Al Gore, other environmental leaders, and a passel of corporate bigwigs will follow throughout the week.

Some Republicans on the committee appear willing to participate in shaping the bill rather just demanding that it be scrapped. At the same time, a number of committee Democrats are none too excited about the legislation.

Oregon Republican Greg Walden, speaking at the Tuesday hearing, called for more incentives for forest protections and a broader definition of renewable energy, but said, "I look forward to hearings on the substance of this matter so we can fix it and make it workable."

Pat Murphy (R-Pa.) also indicated that he believes climate change is a serious issue that should be addressed, and said that improved efficiency and investment in innovation should be priorities. "Where we can find common ground is we want clean air, a clean planet, and clean soil," said Murphy. "The question is, can we do this in a way that boosts our economy, creates jobs rather than sending them overseas, and where American families find opportunities rather than the loss of jobs."

Many Democrats and Republicans alike have complained that the 648-page bill lacks key specifics, including the percentage of emission credits that would auctioned off versus given away, and how the proceeds from an auction would be spent. Without those numbers, they argue, there's no way to know the real economic impact of the bill.

In introducing the legislation several weeks ago, Markey said he and Waxman had left those components open-ended so committee members could weigh in, but that appears to be an unpopular approach.

All 23 Republican members of the panel signed onto a letter to Markey and Waxman on Tuesday that protested the dearth of specifics. "[Y]our discussion draft lacks any decision on permit allocations versus auctions," they wrote. "The manner in which you will address this issue is the cornerstone of the legislation; without it, the bill is simply not finished and not ripe to be marked up or accurately discussed in the context of a hearing."

John Dingell (D-Mich.), who chaired the committee until losing the post to Waxman last November, also noted that the question of auction versus allocation might be a "deal breaker" for some on the panel.

More potential deal-breakers

Dingell also raised a concern, shared by others on the panel, that the bill's renewable electricity standard (RES), calling for 25 percent of power to come from renewable sources by 2025, is too aggressive and "might be more than states can handle." As a possible solution, he suggested that states be allowed to count nuclear power as renewable.

Southern representatives from both sides of the aisle worried that their states might not have enough renewable resources to meet the RES, including G. K. Butterfiled (D- N.C.), Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), Charlie Melancon (D-La), Mike Ross (D-Ark.), and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.). "We cannot achieve a 25 percent mandate by 2025," said Butterfield. "Not only is it impractical, but it is impossible."

Democrats and Republicans from coal states have concerns about the bill's plan to phase in strict carbon controls on coal-fired power plants, and they want more funding for carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology.

And while some moderate Democrats on the panel also expressed concern about the potential costs of the bill, they are equally concerned about the prospect of the EPA regulating emissions instead. "If Congress does not act, greenhouse gases could be regulated without the input of legislators who represent the diverse interests of this country," said Gene Green (D-Texas).

In their letter to Waxman and Markey, the committee's Republicans also requested an additional five hearings on the bill before members start offering amendments, to delve into topics like nuclear power and market oversight. No word yet on whether the majority will accommodate that request; with the timeline they've laid out for getting the bill passed, it would be difficult to schedule.

All of the hearings will be webcast on the Energy and Commerce Committee site, and we'll have regular updates as the they progress.

Related Links:

What to make of the new climate poll

Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets

John McCain’s troubles are the world’s troubles