Democrats confident as US climate change bill vote looms

Sweeping energy and climate change bill would deliver key Obama administration promise to cut US carbon emissions

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009 12.10 BST

Democrats say they are confident of delivering on one of Barack Obama's defining promises tomorrow, by calling a vote in Congress on a sweeping energy and climate change bill.
The bill, produced with hands-on involvement from the White House and surrounded by an intense lobbying and PR offensive, would see the US commit for the first time to cutting back the carbon emissions that cause global warming.
After weeks of attack from Republicans, the energy reform package got an important boost yesterday when its most formidable opponent in Congress – the Democratic chair of the house agricultural committee – said he would now push for its passage.
"We think we have something here now that can work with agriculture," Collin Peterson, who led the Democratic opposition to the bill, told a conference call yesterday. "I think we will be able to get the votes to pass this."
Within the White House and in Congress, the vote is seen as a historic moment, both for Obama's political agenda and international efforts to reach a climate change treaty at Copenhagen at the end of the year.
"This legislation is a game changer of historic proportions," said Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is one of the authors of the bill. "The whole world is waiting to see if Barack Obama can arrive in Copenhagen as a leader of attempts to reduce green house gas emissions."
The importance of the bill was underlined by the deep involvement from the White House. Obama earlier this week urged Congress to pass the bill, and aides have been closely involved in efforts to reach yesterday's compromise. The Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, took a gamble on moving up the date for a vote on the bill to tomorrow.
The gamble appeared to have paid off, with the Democratic leadership putting on a high-profile meeting yesterday with environmental, labour, war veterans and religious groups to talk up the bill's prospects.
"We are going to get this done," said Chris van Hollen, a member of the Democratic leadership in the house of representatives. "It's long overdue."
The bill, now swollen to about 1,200 pages, would bind the US to reduce the carbon emissions from burning oil and coal by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80% by 2050.
It also envisages a range of measures to promote clean energy – from a development bank for new technology to new, greener building codes and targets for expanding the use of solar and wind power.
The Democratic leadership is now hoping to pass the bill by a comfortable margin. Some environmental organisations have suggested that the bill might even win over a small number of Republicans, which would mean an important victory for Obama.
For the most part, however, Republicans have almost uniformly opposed the bill, and say it amounts to a hidden energy tax. They have also argued that the bill would drastically raise electricity prices – a claim debunked with the release of a cost-analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office showing it would cost the average family $175 (£107) by 2020, and would save poor families about $40.
The study – together with the compromises won by Peterson – have made the bill more palatable to Democrats from coal and oil states and from the old manufacturing areas.
"We have been taking people out of the 'no' column, into the 'undecided' column, into the 'yes' column," said Mike Doyle, a Democratic member from a former steel industry town in Pennsylvania. "The momentum is coming to 'yes'."
But Peterson's support appears to have come only after wringing a number of key concessions on the bill over several days of bargaining, overseen by the White House energy and climate advisor, Carol Browner, and other Obama administration officials.
The most significant concession would give the US Department of Agriculture – and not the Environmental Protection Agency – control over a programme that would reward farmers for practices that reduce carbon emissions.
Peterson also forced a four-year delay in a separate environmental regulation that would have cut the profits of corn-based ethanol, and encouraged the development of non-food biofuels instead.
Those concessions have deepened the concerns of some environmental organisations that the bill is not aggressive enough in cutting emissions. However, Henry Waxman, who has been leading the bill through Congress, argued that the most important element of the bill had come through the hard bargaining process intact.
"We have not given away the essentials of the bill because the essentials are the reduction of carbon emissions," he said.