Pollution Reduction Bill Made Stronger
Shira Silberg on September 29th, 2009
Bloomberg’s Jim Efstathiou Jr. reports that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has prepared a “discussion draft” requiring deeper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than the levels approved by the House.
The draft, which will be released on Wednesday, calls on U.S. companies to reduce their impact 20 percent by the year 2020, rather than 17 percent that was approved by the House. U.S. power plants, factories and refineries may need free government-issued emission permits in order to continue to do business. This topic was hotly debated in the House, and was not addressed in the draft of the Senate bill.
The Senate bill would cap greenhouse gas emissions and allow companies to trade permits similar to the cap-and-trade plan approved by the House. According to the New York Times, Senator John Kerry made a special effort to move away from the language of cap-and-trade since it can be confusing to the public and tried to re-frame the conversation in the more concrete concept of reducing pollution. “I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does,” Kerry told reporters. “This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.”
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