Partisan split in congressional delegation reflects national division. Monday, December 17, 2007
WASHINGTON — A split among Austin-area members of Congress about the need for sweeping legislation to combat global warming reflects a national divide between Democrats and Republicans.
And the passage last week of an energy bill in the Senate — stripped of key Democrat-backed provisions that had threatened to trigger a White House veto — served to underscore that disagreement.
Among Texas' two senators and four members of the U.S. House who represent Travis, Williamson and Hays counties, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the only Democrat, is also the only one who speaks forcefully about the need for swift congressional action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases contribute to global warming and other forms of climate change.
"We need action yesterday," Doggett said. "It's long-overdue on all fronts."
Republicans who represent the area in the House and Senate discuss global warming in less urgent terms. They objected to the earlier version of the energy package, which aimed to reduce global warming and paid for some of those efforts with higher taxes on oil and gas companies.The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate until the taxes were removed.
"We all know those taxes are not going to be absorbed by oil companies but ultimately passed along to consumers," said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
Cornyn's fellow senator from Texas, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, also voiced concerns about a provision requiring electric companies to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Southern electric companies in particular said they could not get enough affordable power to meet that mandate. That's not a problem in Austin, which plans to generate 30 percent of its power from renewable sources, primarily from wind farms in West Texas, by that date.
"We're in great shape," said Austin Energy spokesman Ed Clark.
Once Senate leaders removed the taxes on oil companies and the renewable electricity requirements, the energy bill passed the Senate 86-8 late last week. Cornyn and Hutchison voted for it.
The key provision remains the requirement to increase fuel economy standards by 40 percent for cars and light trucks, including sport-utility vehicles, from an industry average of 25 miles per gallon today to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. It would be the first such increase since 1975.
The legislation is headed for the floor of the House this week, where it's likely to get a better reception. Republican Reps. Lamar Smith of San Antonio, John Carter of Round Rock and Michael McCaul of Austin all voted against the earlier version of the bill.
Their staffs would not say Friday how they would vote on the stripped-down version, which the White House has signaled that President Bush would sign.
Doggett hailed the earlier version of the energy package, which, unlike the current one, included a tax credit for plug-in hybrid cars and tightened the requirements that businesses must meet to receive biodiesel tax credits.
"Raising vehicle fuel economy standards for the first time in 32 years means this remains a worthy bill," Doggett said after the Senate vote last week. "But I am already seeking other legislative ways of getting approval for the plug-in hybrid and biodiesel provisions that Republican Senate opposition has obstructed."
The divide within Austin's congressional delegation looks much like one that has surfaced in numerous national polls over the last year. A CBS News-New York Times poll in April found that Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to describe global warming as a "very serious problem" that should be one of the government's highest priorities.
Global warming is caused at least in part by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Those gases — primarily carbon dioxide — come largely from human-made sources, including industry, electric power production and automobiles.
Though Doggett speaks emphatically about the need for higher fuel economy standards and mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, his Republican colleagues are far more muted.
Smith and McCaul co-sponsored Doggett's legislation to provide tax credits for the purchase of plug-in hybrid cars and speak of the need to develop alternative forms of energy, such as solar power.
Yet the House bill they voted against included a plug-in credit and $9 billion in tax incentives for the production of electricity from renewable sources.
"We still get 95 percent of our energy from oil and gas, and it completely ignored doing anything for the oil and gas industry, which is going to hurt Texas and hurt the country," Smith said.
Added McCaul: "I voted for most of the alternative energy legislation that's in this bill at the committee level. My constituents in Austin support alternative energy, as do I. The concern I had with this bill is that it really didn't do enough to bring down the price of gas at the pump."
McCaul said the legislation would not lower gas prices because it would not increase the domestic energy supply. Democrats say the higher fuel standards will save money for consumers at the gas pump.
Though Congress worked and reworked the details of the energy package in 2007, legislation that has not reached the floor of the Senate takes more direct aim at global warming.
A bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Warner, R-Va., would create a so-called cap-and-trade system, in which emissions from the electric power, transportation and manufacturing sectors would be cut to 2005 levels by 2012. Then they would have to keep falling, down to 70 percent below 2005 emission levels, by 2050.
Businesses would receive a certain number of allowances for a certain level of emissions and could sell them to other businesses if they did not need them all.
"Environmentally, the cap is the key piece," said Dan Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. "What the cap does is limit the total amount of global warming pollution that could be put into the atmosphere. That's really the fundamental driver of investment in new technology that's needed to get us on the path of steadily reducing emissions."
Of lawmakers who represent the Austin area in Congress, Doggett is the only one who has called for mandatory emissions caps. He called a cap-and-trade program the "next major step that we need to take."
Though many environmental groups have praised the Lieberman-Warner proposal as a good first step, some have said it does not reduce emissions aggressively enough.
But Frank Maisano, a spokesman for utilities, refineries and wind developers, said the cost of complying with the reductions called for in cap-and-trade proposals could hit Texas particularly hard.
"Texas is in a unique position in that they provide energy for the rest of the country," he said. "So any burdens that are added to energy and the cost of energy will be felt especially hard in Texas because Texas does the energy bidding for much of the rest of the country."
jembry@statesman.com; (202) 887-8329
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