Ucilia Wang
January 15, 2009 at 7:45 PM
The climate change policy debate is heating up as nicely as the Earth’s surface temperatures.
The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a consortium of big businesses and environmental groups, on Thursday unveiled its recommendations on what Congress and the new White House should include in a climate change bill. The proposal, which took two years to conceive, outlines what a carbon emissions cap-and-trade system should look like, including targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions over time.
Plenty of special interest groups have offered their takes on what the legislation should include, including one presented by an industry group for electric utilities yesterday. But the proposal by the USCAP seems to have drawn a lot more attention (criticism) from politicians and environmental groups, noted the WSJ’s Environmental Capital blog.
Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C., helped to present the USCAP’s proposal before the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.
The Republicans on the committee were miffed that they were given little time to review the USCAP proposal before the hearing, the first held by the new committee chairman, Henry Waxman of California. The Republicans also don’t like the cap-and-trade program to begin with.
A cap-and-trade program would (ideally) set strict emission limits and requires any polluters that can’t meet the emission requirements to buy credits from those that pollute much less than allowed. The European Union has run a cap-and-trade program since 2005.
The goal of a cap-and-trade is to nudge companies into cutting emissions, or else they will have to pay. They might have to pay to get those credits in the first place, something that Barack Obama has advocated during the election campaign (in Europe, companies get their first allowances mostly for free, although that might change). Some critics say a cap-and-trade system would be too costly for businesses, especially during an economic downturn.
Obama wants to use the cap-and-trade program to raise billions of dollars over time to pay for a variety of initiatives, including greentech research and business developments.
The USCAP wants the government to give away a big portion of the emission allowances for free, and that doesn’t sound right for some lawmakers and environmental groups. Its schedule for reducing emissions over time also drew ire from groups such as the Union for Concerned Scientists, which wants to see tougher targets.
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