June 6, 2008

Senate Kills Climate Bill

The Carbon bill died in the Senate on Friday after a vote that resulted in 48 senators favoring the bill with 36 opposed, Reuters reports. Sixty votes were needed to take the bill to the next stage.

Six more senators, including Obama McCain, said they would have voted for the bill if they’d been in town to do so.

The bill seemed doomed before debate began. Earlier this week, the White House said that if the bill managed to pass Congress in its current form, President Bush would veto it.

The bill aimed to cut total U.S. global warming emissions by 66 percent by 2050. Opponents said it would cost jobs and raise fuel prices in an already pinched American economy.

Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, focused on the positive aspects of the vote: “The din of Washington politics can’t drown out the drumbeat of progress. Old adversaries came aboard and new supporters stood up for action. In the end, we got a stronger vote on a stronger bill than we had three years ago.”

Similar legislation in previous years did not even come close to getting 50 votes in the Senate, CBS reports.

Senate leaders used a variety of tactics during the week long debate - at one point, Republicans forced clerks to spend 10 hours reading an updated version of the 491-page bill aloud.

Eleven major corporations, including Allianz of America; Catalyst Paper Corporation; FPL Group, Inc.; JohnsonDiversey, Inc.; Johnson & Johnson; Levi Strauss & Co.; National Grid; Nike, Inc.; Novo Nordisk; Tetra Pak; and Xanterra Parks & Resorts, sent a letter to Congress urging the Senate to pass the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 3036).

The news on the vote came as The International Energy Agency said the world needs $45 trillion in additional investment to develop clean technologies in order to reach the goal of cutting global warming emissions 50% by 2050, Bloomberg reports.

The investment equals 1.1 percent of projected global gross domestic product in the period.

The world needs to build 32 new nuclear power plants and 17,500 wind-power turbines each year to halve emissions by 2050, according to the Paris-based energy adviser.

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