Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer introduced the Senate’s version of climate change and energy legislation today. See this for information on the background of the bill and the working draft itself. I won’t go into an analysis right now. (I’ll be getting on that soon, along with about 5,000 other commentators.) You’ll fershur be seeing it compared to the Waxman-Markey bill that the House of Representatives passed in June. One thing it’s got that Waxman-Markey doesn’t is attention paid to natural gas. That’s significant. Natural gas can have a very important role to play as we transition to a zero-carbon world as I indicated here recently.
Another aspect of the Kerry-Boxer bill is that it has slightly more ambitious short-term GHG reduction goals than Waxman-Markey does. For more on the bill, see the first link above and this from my friends at Grist, plus this political analysis from Reuters as well as this Factbox. The BBC reported that President Obama was happy. “With the draft legislation they are announcing today, we are one step closer to putting America in control of our energy future.”
Finally, you should watch today’s press conference with Senators Boxer and Kerry giving the highlights of the bill and talking about how there’s much important work to be done. That, not incidentally, is not just work to done by federal legislators and staff. They mean that all of us interested in promoting strong and smart climate and energy legislation have got to stay at it and keep pushing. As a very great American poet, Robert Hunter, wrote:
Small wheel turn by the fire and rod
Big wheel turn by the grace of God
Everytime that wheel turn round
bound to cover just a little more ground.
We have to help keep that wheel turning.
