Climate bill passes

WASHINGTON — Legislation imposing the first nationwide limits on the pollution blamed for global warming advanced in the House late Thursday, clearing a key committee despite strong Republican opposition.

The Energy and Commerce Committee approved the sweeping climate bill 33-25 after repeatedly turning back GOP attempts to kill or weaken the measure during four days of debate.

The panel’s action increases the likelihood that the full House for the first time will address broad legislation to tackle climate change later this year. The Senate has yet to take up the issue.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, said the bill represents "decisive and historic action” to increase America’s energy security and deal with warming.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has promised to press for passage of climate legislation this year, but prospects remain uncertain, especially in the Senate. President Barack Obama has told Congress he too wants a bill this year, ahead of international climate talks in December.

The House bill requires factories, refineries and power plants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and six other greenhouse gases by roughly 80 percent by mid-century and hasten the nation’s energy shift away from fossil fuels by putting a price on carbon dioxide releases.

Only one Republican — Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California — crossed party lines to support the bill. Four Democrats voted no. She said that while she had concerns about the bill, including its cost, the country can’t wait "to make needed changes to our energy policy.”

Waxman had vowed to get the 946-page bill out of his committee before Memorial Day.

"The American people are overwhelming calling for a new direction … to take action in a way that changes forever our relationship with imported oil, with the loss of jobs overseas, with the pollution that is causing greenhouse gas warming on our planet,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass..



by the associated press

House split over Climate Bill

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore, a leading voice on climate change, urged lawmakers Friday to overcome partisan differences and take action to reduce greenhouse gases, but Democrats and Republicans sparred even more vigorously over the cost of dealing with global warming.

Gore, who won a Nobel prize, told a congressional hearing that "the dire and growing threat” of a warmer earth requires the parties to unite to deal with the threat. He endorsed a House Democratic bill that would limit carbon dioxide and other pollution linked to warming.

But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., argued that the Democratic proposal to reduce greenhouse gases would "punish the American people” by imposing higher energy costs and threatening jobs.

"This bill is an energy tax,” Gingrich said. "An energy tax punishes senior citizens, it punishes rural Americans, if you use electricity it punishes you.”

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee that is writing the bill, shot back that Gingrich was resorting to "the old scare tactics” designed to undermine any congressional effort to address the problem.

by the associated press