Senators receptive as Gore pushes for climate change legislation this year

[struggle4progress]

By Frank Davies
Mercury News Washington Bureau
Posted: 01/28/2009 05:58:07 PM PST


WASHINGTON — ... In early 2007, Gore played the role of a fired-up prophet, determined to spur Congress to curb greenhouse gas emissions. GOP reaction ranged from respect to disparagement, with Trent Lott calling his notions "garbage," Larry Craig mocking Gore's Academy Award-winning "performance" and James Inhofe belittling the reality of climate change.

Not so on Wednesday. The former vice president and members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee traded ideas and compliments and actually listened carefully to each other.

And Gore's essential message was well received, that despite economic woes, this is the year to enact mandatory limits on carbon emissions and reach a global climate agreement to reduce heat-trapping gases and slow down deforestation.

"I don't want to be chest-beating about it, but our country is the only country that can lead the world community" on climate change, Gore told the committee ...

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11575954?source=most_viewed

[Kolesar]

1. Government is going to have to choose carbon-taxes or carbon-credits-trading

Which they refer to as "cap and trade" in this excerpt. There are a growing number of calls for carbon taxes, including NASA's James Hansen. Skeptics think that carbon trading can be "gamed" to the public's disadvantage.
--=--

Gore urged Congress to adopt the huge stimulus package as drawn up in the House, saying it will give renewable and alternative fuels a major boost and build a better electric "smart" grid. That would make it easier for Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, with a system for utilities and other companies that pollute less than the limit to trade or sell permits to those over the limit.

[struggle4progress]

2. I agree about credit-trading: "We're doubling our CO2 output this year

because we're planting rose-bushes in the yards of all our top executives, and we're buying carbon credits from homeless people in Mumbai"

Taxes have a problem too: it means the big industries write off their pollution as a business expense while poorer operations go belly up

The problem is to develop a meaningful and gradually decreasing cap, with adequate accounting for emissions worldwide, a fair way to allocate emissions rights world-wide, and effective enforcement -- because there will be a lot of cheating

[salguine]

3. A friend of mine just came back from a ten-day business trip to

China, and he said that trip completely erased any hope he ever had of humans averting a climate disaster.