Home / News /

Cap-and-trade vote a benchmark for both sides

June 30, 2009 —

Coming as it did during the news eclipse created by the unrest in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson, the House passage Friday of the cap-and-trade bill on a 219-212 vote has received scant notice. Nevertheless, it was the most significant vote since the Recovery Act, and the most closely-fought legislative engagement of the young Obama Administration.

The bill’s passage was far from certain before last Tuesday, when the bill’s sponsors struck a deal 

with blue-dog, farm-state Democrats which gives the Agriculture Department, rather than the Environmental Protection Agency, oversight of the program which gives farmers credit for planting trees and taking other “green” measures to reduce carbon emissions.

By then the bill, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2020, already included enough concessions to industry and utility interests to cause some environmentalist to question  whether it was worth the effort. The key player in the bill’s long Energy and Commerce Committee markup was a congressman from coal country, US Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who struck the deal with authors Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) which allowed the bill to go forward.

Where the bill goes from here is far from certain.

“Friday’s going to look tame compared to what’s going to go on in the Senate,” said Suzanne Watson, policy director for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, which supports the bill.

Whatever happens in the Senate, the Friday vote was a considerable milestone for the President and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who pushed for a vote on the measure before this week’s Independence Day break. Advocates of the bill cast it as a first, imperfect step toward a more energy-efficient nation, while opponents are comparing it with the 1993 vote on the Clinton tax increase, which led to the defeat so many House Democrats the following year.

“Essentially, it’s a tax increase, which places artificial emissions standards on American companies and energy producers,” said Chris Jackson, spokesman for US Rep. Phil Gingrey, who battled the bill on the House floor last Friday and voted against it.

The vote on Friday went down basically along party lines, but it wasn’t quite as clear-cut as that fateful 1993 vote. There were 44 Democratic votes against the bill, the bulk of them from the South and West, and only eight Republican votes in favor. But those eight votes were crucial; if four of them had gone the other way, the bill would have failed.

In this vote, regional differences played nearly as big a role as party.

“What we need is a direct plan of sustained public support for research, development, and deployment of new sources of energy, on the order of the Apollo program or Manhattan Project, and that isn’t in this bill.  This bill is also unfair to people in states like ours, that don’t already have existing sources of renewable energy,” US Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.), who voted against the bill Friday, said in a statement.

That objection – that the Southeast doesn’t have the windy open spaces necesary for windmills and solar installations – was heard frequently in the debate over the bill. But Watson said the Southern states do have a lot of something the bill allows them to capitalize on: wasted energy.

The bill requires large utilities to begin producing electricity with a higher percentage of renewable resources, gradually increasing to 20 percent of total production by 2020. The bill allows up to 5 percent  to be achieved through increases in energy efficiency, but governors can petition for an addition 3 percent. Most of the Southern states currently rank near the bottom in energy efficiency.