whitehouse
Posted on 06/15/2008 2:16:49 PM PDT by Libloather
R.I. Sen. Whitehouse sees silver lining in demise of global-warming bill
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 15, 2008
BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau
whitehouse
WASHINGTON — The Senate’s global-warming bill, many months in the making, is dead for this congress, but one of the senators involved in preparing it says the work wasn’t wasted.
The next president, whether Barack Obama or John McCain, is likely to sign into law a bill, based on the one that faltered last week in the Senate, that is meant to curb the pace of climate change, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview Wednesday.
Democrat Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which drafted the global-warming bill late last year under the chairmanship of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal. Its chief sponsors were independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, of Connecticut, and Republican Sen. John W. Warner, of Virginia.
With the support of both presidential candidates and a majority of senators, they built the bill around a system known for short as “cap and trade.” Caps would be fixed on the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions that, say, a power company would be allowed to emit. Companies that could beat the targets could trade the remainder of their emission allowance on a newly created market.
“The simple essence of the proposition,” Whitehouse said, “is that the people who are polluting our atmosphere with carbon and warming up the planet won’t be able to do it any longer for free.”
As Whitehouse sees it, the program would bring two great boons for the economy as it slows the rate of global warming, limiting the rise of sea levels and other dangers. Most obvious would be the saving of the untold cost of repairing the catastrophic damage from floods and other global-warming effects, Whitehouse said.
In addition, Whitehouse foresees the program forcing a huge shift from imported oil to domestically produced fuel alternatives, plus energy conservation. While the effect on individual industries and classes of consumer will differ, he said that overall “it will prove to save money” against the cost of energy and other products rendered from foreign oil. The money spent on conservation and green-energy alternatives, he said, will stay in the American economy. Thus, Whitehouse argued, the new system will be an improvement over the status quo, under which the cost of fuel is “put on your credit card at the pump, bounced once on the books of Exxon-Mobil and then sent out to the Saudis.”
Not everyone agrees, of course. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, argued that the Lieberman-Warner bill amounted to a gigantic system of new tax levies on all kinds of industries. He said those costs will inevitably be passed onto consumers — an argument that prompted opponents to point to the likely political fallout from still-higher energy prices at the moment when $4-per-gallon gasoline has arrived. Opponents also expressed skepticism that, without such options as nuclear power and exploitation of domestic oil reserves, the global-warming bill wouldn’t generate anything like the volume of new energy sources that its supporters envision.
The Lieberman-Warner bill bogged down over a partisan dispute. But its supporting majority was not big enough to move it this year anyway; Senate rules allow foes of any measure to try to kill it by delay. It takes a majority of 60 votes to force consideration of any bill, and the global-warming bill fell short of that.
But Whitehouse said the exercise of writing the bill during this Congress will hasten the passage of a comparable one in the next. The compromise-driven process of drafting the bill in the environment committee, with ideas continually tested by votes on amendments, helped senators smooth out “rough patches” in a wide variety of areas. Votes in committee and the floor debate also “smoked a lot of people out” as to whether they would vote for the bill and, if not, what possible changes might bring them on board.
Whitehouse expressed particular satisfaction with two provisions that he helped work into the bill. One would send some of the proceeds of the new emissions-allowance market to studies of just how rising seas will affect coastal areas such as Rhode Island, in order to fashion useful adaptations.
Studies, for example, would be the effect of rising seas on “how tides move, how storm surges will work,” he said. “A little rise in sea level can make a big differenece because of the concentration of the surge as it, for instance, comes up Narragansett Bay running ahead of the storm.”
The mapping, studies and other information — along with inventories of shoreside industries, residential tracts, water-treatment plants and so on — could help leaders plan steps to prevent damage and otherwise adapt to rising seas.
Whitehouse also pointed to provisions of the bill that he said would ensure sound and honest dealing on a huge new market that, unregulated, might invite mischief.
For those of you who may not have seen it yet, I suggest -
The sun warms the planet (duh), CO2 is irrelevent.
Another RI a-hole. Where do they find such Men?
Leiberman said the exact same thing on the news the day the bill failed. It did not matter that the bill failed because the next President (McCain-Obama)would get it passed.
Complete, smarmy fantasia. Just pass a law and the problem is solved. Mandate it and it will happen.
When there is 8 inches of snow on the ground in Nashville next winter this crap will be dead.
Conservatives running for Congress this year can truly use this issue as an incentive to vote for conservatives and to vote for conservatism on November 4! Truly having enough conservatives block the sham known as man-made global warming is something to successfully run on as is successfully blocking the eventual full enactment of the Fairness Doctrine and truly preventing amnesty for illegal immigrants to occur at all and preventing illegals from legally voting in all future U.S. elections! These are crazy times where too many candidates for political office may end up losing anyways despite having political substance and commonsense on their side! Arrgh!
The Republicrat party is waiting for either one of its candidates to become President.
I am writing in Newt Gingrich’s name in the Presidential slot.
The atmosphere is made up of about 78% nitrogen, a relative inert gas, about 21% oxygen, a really reactive gas that would disappear within a very few decades if living organisms were somehow suddenly to cease to exist, about 1% argon, a "noble gas" that is not at all chemically active, anywhere from 1% to 4% water vapor (the most highly variable component of the atmosphere, and by far the most important of ALL greenhouse gases), then way down the list, about one-twenty-fifth of 1%, CO2, carbon dioxide. There are a few others, like ammonia, which does not remain free in the atmosphere very long, and various oxides of nitrogen, which also do not remain free very long, then WAY down, far to the lower end, there is methane, which, being quite light, floats up and is decomposed into carbon dioxide and water vapor by the action of the sun and free oxygen in the atmosphere. There are also various small fractions of things like sulfur dioxide (which dissolves in rain water and is washed out out of the sky), hydrogen sulfide (which oxidizes quickly to sulfur dioxide and water in the presence of oxygen), and such strange rarities as mercury vapor, radon, and complex hydrocarbons.
Only in very highly contained localities does the air composition vary much from what are these nearly universal constants, like in a coal mine or in a valley that lies under a "thermal inversion" a layer of cold air that overlies a pocket of warm air, and prevents the normal mixing of the atmosphere. Under these highly contained conditions, "air pollution", the excess of noxious compounds and elements in the atmosphere, can occur. But in these same limited locations, the problem may be more easily cured by assuring adequate ventilation, than banning the production of carbon dioxide, CO2, a part of the natural cycle in which oxygen that is used up by a vast array of naturally occurring chemical reactions, by the life cycles of living material, and to a VERY SMALL degree, the activities of mankind, is continuously replaced by the process of photosynthesis, by which this TINY amount of CO2 is combined with water, generating free oxygen and some form of a carbohydrate, mostly a simple sugar to begin with.
The presence or absence of some multiple of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has nothing to do with the temperature of the earth. The presence of water vapor has an effect that ranges from 25 times to well over 100 times the effect of even the highest concentration of CO2 has EVER had, in the eons since life first arose on earth. It is a peculiarity of CO2, that it exists primarily as a gas, and only under certain extreme conditions, is it ever changed into a liquid (GREAT pressure) or into a solid (dry ice, at -109.3º F.) Under normal atmospheric conditions, CO2 transforms directly from a solid to a gas as it warms, a process called sublimation. It does not go through solid to a fairly long liquid phase to vapor like water does, and thus does not have the heat transferring properties of water vapor.
Because CO2 does not have the same characteristics as ice/water/water vapor in transferring heat, it is eliminated immediately as the culprit in "global warming". If there is to be cause assigned, it is to the various forms of water, that control the average temperature of earth. The SOURCE of increasing or decreasing amounts of energy that fall upon earth as heat energy, is due almost entirely to radiation received from the sun, and to a very small degree, the slow escape of heat from our planet's molten core by convection and conduction up through the rocky mantle of the earth's crust.
Yes, but those who promote this nonsense don’t care about the truth; they just want more and more centralized command government control, for which they will adapt any scam that sells.
Global warming on Free Republic
Why? He did a global warming ad. I’m sure he’d sign it just as fast.
Newt's sanity and common sense left the building some time ago. I used to enjoy listening to the man speak. Now he just embarrasses me.
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