Baucus Puts Together A Strange Witness List for Climate Bill Testimony
UPDATE: Congress Matters gets right to the heart of what we were writing about earlier: Sen. Max Baucus is stacking the deck against the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill in order to weaken it. Notably, the American Council on Capital Formation, where witness Margo Thorning works, has received a little over $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil since 1998. Let’s see, just for fun, if natural gas, which Exxon has been pushing recently, in her testimony tomorrow.
ORIGINAL POST: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will get his chance to tear into climate change legislation that is, at best, adrift and without a hope of passing in its current form.
Baucus, the only Democrat who voted against the Kerry-Boxer legislation in the Environment and Public Works Committee, has promised deference in at least the allocation of allowances.
He told ClimateWire’s Darren Samuelsohn:
“I don’t want to say we’re going to do something totally different,” he said. “I’m respectful of the House allocation.”
But, if the witness list is any indication, he’s going to look at import taxes to protect American manufacturing and more nuclear. At least two out of the five witnesses , curiously, don’t support climate change legislation at all.First off, Ambraham Breehey, from the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers will likely argue that the bill must include a provision that importers of carbon intensive primary goods pay tariffs.
Margo Thorning, from the American Council for Capital Formation, is pro carbon tax and pro nuclear. Interestingly, Thorning notes that any reductions from in CO2 as a result of cap and trade will be minimal.
And then there’s Kenneth Green, from the American Enterprise Institute, who is all about building “resilience to global warming impacts.” What does resilience mean in this context?
What it does not mean is curbing greenhouse gas emissions, since we lack the technology to do so without creating huge economic disruption. He told the Environment and Public Works Committee in late October:
The money and attention that we are spending on mitigation efforts is largely wasted – even if we shut the U.S. and the EU off completely, the trajectory of emissions from China and India will negate the environmental benefit of our self-sacrifice completely in only a few years.
Instead, he proposes such easy to accomplish measures as encouraging people to move away from the water.
Perhaps we’re missing something, but this is a strange witness list.
