There’s a lot of speculation over how the Senate is going to handle the energy bill, most of which is fueled by comments that Sen. Schumer made on Monday.
Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership and a close ally of Reid’s, said Monday that climate legislation would not be part of the bill that came to the Senate floor.
Schumer said the climate proposal crafted by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) would be offered as an amendment to an energy bill based largely on legislation devised by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).
The Bingaman proposal would be “the base bill upon which John Kerry will seek to add this bill,” Schumer said on MSNBC Monday morning.
Schumer, through his staff, has walked that prediction back a bit but his comments were at least a trial balloon and perhaps accurate. It’s probably a reaction to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s decision to oppose his own bill. Unless some Republicans are willing to cross the aisle, carbon caps aren’t happening. Consider that Sen. Jay Rockefeller is going to vote on Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s amendment to strip the EPA of their authority to regulate emissions.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he would support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution of disapproval to halt EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.
“I intend to vote for Sen. Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval because I believe we must send a strong message that the fate of West Virginia’s economy, our manufacturing industries and our workers should not be solely in the hands of EPA,” Rockefeller said in a statement.
Now, a lot of the past year I’ve been willing to give a nod to the procedural obstacles to passing the best legislation possible, but with the oil spill in the Gulf, it really should be possible to make a frontal assault on Republican intransigence. We’ll never have a better setting or a more compelling object lesson to help us make the case for strong anti-petrochemical legislation. On this particular issue, I believe it is a no-lose situation to go strong. We can always come back and pass something weak. But we ought to test the Republicans’ willingness to fight for the oil companies while there is an environmental apocalypse going on in the Gulf.
I don’t think it’s happening. We won’t get the GOPers, and the Dems are too dependent on senators from states that make their livings from emissions.
Is Murkowski’s amendment likely to pass?
If it does, not only will we get no climate bill, we will take the first step to gutting the Clean Air Act.
I hope this is a case where having to have 60 votes works to our advantage.
No, it’s not likely to pass. I suspect it can gather 45 votes, but I doubt it has 50.
l’m not sure about the 60 vote threshold, ims, it only requires 51, so it’s certainly not inconceivable that it could pass. l don’t know about the rest of the centrist [corporate stooge] dems, but my senators, bennet and udall, are nays. l doubt they’ll be the only ones.
however, it’s interesting to note that murkowski and graham are rallying support for the alternative ratpublican plan.
same ol’ same ol’.
either way, it’s not likely any reality based legislation will pass. they’re going to keep kicking this can down the road until it’s too late…assuming of course that we haven’t already crossed that threshold.
It’s not happening.
“I intend to vote for Sen. Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval because I believe we must send a strong message that the fate of West Virginia’s economy, our manufacturing industries and our workers should not be solely in the hands of EPA,” Rockefeller said in a statement.
Yes, because we need to send the strongest possible message that we stand shoulder to shoulder with multi-national polluters who get their workers killed on a regular basis (JOBS JOBS JOBS!) that the fate of our planet, that our children’s future, is solely in the hands of sociopathic corporate vampires like BP.
This will end up being a threshold moment in Obama’s Presidency. I agree that the spill presents a golden opportunity to go big, and in a way that he should have done even without the spill. But it’s clear that unless he can go big with an assertiveness and determination that he has only rarely shown flashes of so far in his Presidency, it won’t fly. And if it doesn’t happen, his Presidency will be an endless series of messy skirmishes that don’t get us where we need to go.
Apparently Wall Street, corporations, elected officials and rank and file citizens are more than willing to keep on a suicidal course. Things are so f*cked up on so many levels–the Bush/Reagan Legacy ripened to perfection in every area of our lives–that only a perfectly executed Hail Mary can reverse the course of self-destruction and dumbing-down that we’re on. At this point I’m not certain he has it in him.
What we should do is remove oil subsidies, or threaten to remove them. Use this as grandstanding. It won’t happen, but we can use it to our advantage, politically. Grandstand, grandstand, grandstand.
In terms of actual passing, just pass an energy bill, keep the climate stuff out of it. It just ain’t happening. Go big on the energy stuff, especially alternatives and nuclear (the newer power plants, not American shit from the 70’s).
In terms of climate, use the EPA.
The only way we will get serious about climate change is to make dirty energy expensive, and when they’re getting $550 billion in subsidies worldwide, that means putting a price on carbon.
Any plan that doesn’t increase the cost of carbon-based fuels and invest it in alternative energy … whatever you want to call it … is a worthless bill.
Physics and geology simply don’t adapt well to what is ‘politically feasible’.
I wonder if Graham’s disassocation from the bill was deliberately baked into the cake ahead of time. It’s hard to imagine he could sponsor a climate change bill all the way through and then survive a South Carolina Republican primary down the road. Maybe he is still working more flexible members in the background.
So they’ll wait 4 more years to Primary him? We’ll either be in Obama’s second term .. or Palin’s first by then
There should just be a huge investment in energy efficiency and independence that will as a side benefit reduce carbon emissions.