.............. It can only happen if they can get beyond the 60 vote cloture which is making everything grind to a halt in the Senate right now
Initially they brought up a climate change bill and had a vote on it. That bill was defeated. They also though have been developing an energy bill in the senate. The house developed its package: energy and climate change together, passed it, sent the bill over to the senate. Its been sitting there since June of last year.
Now the Senate didn't like the climate change language in the house bill and said perhaps it would only pass an energy bill and the Senate prefers to pass things individually and not package...
Well then Kerry and Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman have said we're going to try to re-package the climate bill and see if we can't pass it.... (aside on his love of Carbon tax............)
we ought to put a tax on carbon and then pass the savings along through the payroll to end users and consumers who will surely see an increase in their pricing. climate change -the way we've configured it right now-relies too much on wall street to produce the solution. It became a very ingenious way of talking about climate change without suggesting there had to be taxes. Because instead there would be financial instruments that will allow trades to take place, does this sound familiar at all? -financial instruments that will allow the packing and bundling of trades to take place that could be sold either as derivatives or overseas that would drive costs down that people could buy from etc. you may know of course I'm sure you do that Europe had put together a similar kind of package fraught with a lot of uh (inaudible)
I'm a big fan of Thomas Friedman I had an extensive interview with him in my office and tried very hard to put forward carbon legislation -carbon tax legislation- which I believe is more direct more accountable and achieves the goal quicker.
In fact even this past summer a lot of European nations were saying "how do we hold one another accountable on these issues if we don't go to a system like that?" While I applaud any effort that's made in climate change I think ultimately we're gonna move to some form of carbon tax to make sure we have accountable and transparent means of checking out how other nations including our own respond to the importance of climate change...
So the house has a bill. It's sitting in the Senate.
Lieberman, Kerry, Graham are trying to propose an amendment to either their energy bill or provide a stand alone bill that they would hope to bring to the floor and get bipartisan support... but it would be a different bill than the house of representatives bill-it would probably come over on its own to the house, if it were to pass, if they're able to bring it up in the senate, if they're able to get beyond the 60 vote cloture which members of the senate on the other side say they would oppose it.
[.....] Republicans have always called "cap and trade" "cap and tax"- they're saying people are going to pay a tax regardless, and I agree with them, that there will be taxes paid so why aren't we taxing pollution instead of people's labor.
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