Full Push For A Senate Climate Change Bill
Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are pushing ahead to get their bi-partisan climate change and energy bill on the Senate floor for a full vote. Read More »
Scott Brown Election Dims Prospect for Climate Change Legislation
Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-Mass.)
Is climate change legislation dead? Not quite, but it does face a new and unexpected hurdle called Senator-elect Scott Brown (R- Mass.).
Staffers on Capitol Hill suggested to GER that last night’s stunning reversal is a game changer. Read More »
Obama to Attend Copenhagen Climate Change Talks
The last time he was in Copenhagen
UPDATE: The White House has released an official statement on President Obama’s planned trip to speak at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen on Dec. 9.
The statement reads, in part:
…the President is prepared to put on the table a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020 and ultimately in line with final U.S. energy and climate legislation.
Read the full statement after the jump. Read More »
Climate Change Policy and the “Trillionth Tonne”
Mankind is currently on track to release the 1 trillionth tonne of carbon into the atmosphere in late March of 2045, according to this doomsday clock created by Oxford University’s Myles Allen.
One trillions tonnes (or 3.67 trillion tonnes of CO2) is the total budget for emissions until 2500 if we hope to limit global warming to 2 degree celsius.
We’ve already spent a bit more than half of our emissions budget since the industrial revolution began in 1750. (Here’s the Nature article with Allen’s research.)
The fact that carbon emissions have a cumulative effect, as Shell’s Climate Change Advisor David Hone points out, presents a policy problem that we’re not currently addressing or even really thinking about. Read More »
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. Read More »
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