Bond, GOP won’t show for climate-change bill mark-up
Sen. Bond
WASHINGTON — Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond’s red pen will stay in his pocket during Tuesday’s mark-up of the sweeping cap-and-trade climate bill.
That’s because Bond and his six fellow Republicans on the 19-member Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will boycott the mark-up as they demand more data from the Environmental Protection Agency on the bill’s financial impact.
The EPA has already released an economic impact study, but Republicans argue it is incomplete. Republicans have generally voiced opposition to the bill, which was co-authored by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and John Kerry, D-Mass.
The general GOP refrain has been that the bill will cause energy rates to skyrocket and hurt the average American (Bond has been lamenting the bill as a $3.6-trillion gas tax), while proponents argue it is environmentally responsible and will spur the green jobs industry. Republicans also have argued the bill hurts Midwestern residents more than those on the coasts.
“Missouri families and workers expect me to know what this 1,000-page bill will cost them before I start voting on it,” Bond said in a statement Monday.
The committee held three days of hearings last week and called more than 50 witnesses to testify about the bill’s impact on the environment, utilities, national defense and businesses — which Boxer, the committee’s chairwoman, cites as enough testimony to move on. Generally, at least two members of each party must be present for a bill mark-up in the committee, but Boxer said she plans to move forward because all required notices regarding the hearing have been filed.
“We will give (Republicans) the opportunity, as we proceed this week, to reconsider their decision,” Boxer said in a statement issued today. “We look forward to working with them if they decide to participate, but if they do not, we will move forward in accordance with the rules of the Senate and of this committee.”
Democrats have been relatively quiet regarding the boycott, and probably for good reason — they led a similar boycott in 2005 when considering changes to the Clean Air Act.
While some have said the bill has little chance to pass this year, efforts have proceeded behind the scenes to craft provisions that further boost nuclear power hoping to win additional Senate support.
It’s completely irresponsible of Kit Bond to threaten this kind of boycott when so much is at stake for Missouri. He claims to be concerned about “Missouri’s families and workers,” but I can’t help but wonder if what he’s really interested in protecting are coal companies and the Farm Bureau. The clean energy bill would help create almost 36,000 new jobs in Missouri, while protecting corn and soybean yields as well as incomes in the hunting, angling, forestry, and shipping industries. At the same time, it would encourage energy efficiency in homes, businesses, and large-scale industrial plants and create easy ways for Missourians to adapt to efficiency measures, so much so that metal manufacturers, for example, could save $17.5 million through energy efficiency alone. And all of these benefits would cost the average American about three to four dollars a month.
Yes, Missouri and much of the Midwest are especially reliant on coal, but that’s exactly why we need this bill at least as much as any other state in the union. The coal lobby in Congress is powerful (just look at Sen. Bond’s alliances) and coal subsidies have kept it artificially cheap–yet Missouri still possesses vast clean energy resources and the state clean energy industry has a remarkable 5.4% job growth rate even during these tough economic times. The long and short of it is, clean energy is our future, and it’s high time that we invest in this healthy and profitable market before we end up buying wind turbines from China.
Kit Bond may be a lost cause, but Claire McCaskill must stand up for Missouri’s true needs–not those of the coal or corporate agriculture lobbyists–and vote in favor of the clean energy bill that comes to the Senate floor.
In recent years, the high oil price has taxed jobs word-wide, therefore job creation via developing sustainable resources is considered to be imperative, which might be a final focus of this great recession.