Andrew Newton 
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The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill has passed the House of Representatives late Friday night. Although the bill is too watered-down for many progressives, it does seem indeed to be better than no bill at all; considering it only passed by 7 votes, it seems the US came very close to having no bill.
Sam Stein: "The climate change bill would reset drastically the way the U.S. government approaches the issue of regulating pollution. Instituting a cap and trade system, the bill aims to cut America\'s production of greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050. The legislation also includes provisions to create alternative energy sources and cleaner technologies, as well as more efficient building standards.
In an effort to recruit the support of lawmakers sitting on the fence, its authors, prominent progressive Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif) and Ed Markey (D-Mass), reduced goals for carbon emission reductions and threw in favors for the coal and agricultural industries."
It is just one more step in the process of getting the Waxman-Markey climate-energy bill passed, but it is an important step.
You might think that getting a sufficient number of liberals to agree on legislation to brig into being a price for carbon emissions would not be hard, but the behind the scenes effort to get enough votes has been tough.
Sticking points have been Democrats that have recently taken seats from Republicans in more conservative parts of the US, and Democrats representing farming constituencies who stand to have their environmental impacts brought into the carbon count fully for the first time.
Nancy Pelosi is credited with having organized the strong arming.
If the agreement sticks, a vote on Friday should see the bill pass in the House of Representatives.
In a speech to lawmakers, the US president argued the law was needed because clean energy technology held the key to economic prosperity.
Calling the legislation historic, he said the adoption of the Waxman-Markey Bill would underpin energy security as well as tackle carbon pollution.
The Congressional Budget Office review of the cost to consumers of proposed climate change legislation shows a cost much lower than GOP talking points.
Republicans including GOP House leader John Boehner have quoted an increase in annual energy costs per householdas high as $3,128 by 2015, and the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation took the bidding up as high as $4,300 per annum.
The CBO - a non-partisan office - arrived at the figure of $175 for an average household by 2020.
Republicans insist the CBO figure does not attach enough weight to the export of jobs abroad to countries that do not cap their emissions.
In his New York Times blog, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman berates those touting high economic damage from making carbon cost.
Attacking Robert Samuelson's blog, he says:
"I don’t especially mean to pick on Samuelson, but this column exemplifies a strange thing about the climate change debate. Opponents of a policy change generally believe that market economies are wonderful things, able to adapt to just about anything — anything, that is, except a government policy that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Limits on the world supply of oil, land, water — no problem. Limits on the amount of CO2 we can emit — total disaster."
The Obama administration is set to regulate CO2 emissions through the Environmental Protection Agency, pressurizing Congress to agree a way forward.
Last year a Supreme Court judgment held that the EPA had authority to regulate CO2 under air pollution laws. The Bush administration turned down the opportunity.
President Obama has given the EPA the green light to regulate CO2 and an announcement is expected from the regulator as early as this week.
Once the EPA's regulations are published, albeit not in force, Congress won't be able simply to sit on its hands but will instead feel pressure to introduce its own legislation.
The administration is pushing for agreement on a cap-and-trade regime by the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen in December.
According to BusinessGreen:
"He said that carbon taxes would provide greater price certainty to businesses, make it easier to encourage emerging countries to enter into an international deal on climate change and would be less susceptible to corruption than alternative cap-and-trade measures."
IHT: " [President] Obama and Democratic leaders argue that cap-and-trade, in which polluters must either reduce emissions on their own or buy credits from more-efficient companies, is a better system for assuring reductions, letting the market set the right to pollute.
But the main reason most in Washington recoil from a carbon tax is political: few are willing to openly advocate billions of dollars in new taxes at a time of economic distress, even though a cap-and-trade program also means higher energy prices.
Many congressional Democrats were around in 1993 when President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore pushed an energy tax and then abandoned it after it failed to generate any Republican support. Some noticed last fall when the Liberal Party in Canada suffered its worst loss ever running on a platform that included a national energy tax."
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