Obama vows to keep fighting for a climate bill, despite its death in the Senate last week.Photo courtesy of the White House via Flickr
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday pledged to fight on for a climate-change bill, despite the collapse of Senate legislation designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
Obama, after talks with Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, said a watered-down energy bill soon to come before senators, shorn of climate-change action, was just a first step. The bill focuses on the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and developing alternative-energy projects.
“That legislation is an important step in the right direction,” said Obama. “But I want to emphasize it’s only the first step and I intend to keep pushing for broader reform, including climate legislation.”
Obama said the Gulf oil spill had shown that current U.S. energy policy was “unsustainable,” arguing that the United States could not stand by and let China create the clean-energy jobs of the future.
“We should be developing those renewable-energy resources and creating those high-wage, high-skill jobs right here in the United States of America,” he said. “That’s what comprehensive energy and climate reform would do, and that’s why I intend to keep pushing this issue forward.”
Obama’s Democratic allies last week acknowledged they lacked votes to approve the first-ever U.S. plan restricting carbon emissions and shelved the legislation.
With Republicans hoping for big gains in November’s congressional polls, the move may mean the end of carbon-capping legislation for the forseeable future, dealing a blow to the global effort to battle warming.
Obama, who will this week step up his political campaigning ahead of midterm elections in November, warned lawmakers to ignore “chatter” about politics and polls and honor their commitments to voters. “The folks we serve … they sent us here for a reason,” he said. “They sent us here to listen to their voices, they sent us here to represent their interests, not our own.”
So what’s actually in the Senate bill?
Later, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) unveiled legislation, dubbed the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Accountability Act, aimed at boosting clean energy and energy efficiency.
The measure aims to ensure that BP pays fully for damage from the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and aims to drive the firm and other oil giants to develop new technologies to prevent and respond to future spills. It would also overhaul U.S. government agencies in a bid to improve their ability to respond to such catastrophes.
It would scrap a $75 million cap on oil firms’ liability for economic damages from major spills, making energy firms responsible not just for total cleanup costs but also job or revenue losses.
The bill would sharply increase a per-barrel oil tax from eight cents to 49 cents; the tax fills a special trust fund to pay for damages from major spills. And the bill would raise the cap on per-incident Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund expenditures from $1 billion to $5 billion.
The bill also includes $5 billion to provide point-of-sale rebates to consumers buying energy-efficient appliances, and promotes a shift to vehicles powered by natural gas or electricity.
