Free Republic

Some of the Democrats who have been spiking the ball in the end zone after the passage of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” probably didn’t read all of the finer details in the bill. They’ve been celebrating its passage along with Joe Biden as the “biggest climate legislation” to ever be passed. They have also been grudgingly thanking West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin for getting the bill over the finish line. But it turns out that Manchin snuck in a few items that haven’t drawn many headlines yet and the climate warriors aren’t going to be very happy about them....

There are five Democratic House members who won their seats in 2020 despite Donald Trump carrying their districts. Those five are number one on the GOP target list, and the upcoming vote on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act will almost certainly mean their doom in November. The fact that inflation is going to keep rising, despite a bill that’s being sold as a way to reduce it, will be very difficult to defend when the election rolls around. And for these five condemned politicians, asking them what they want for their last meal is probably not out of line. Thirty...

​Sen. Joe Manchin threatened to block President Biden’s climate change and infrastructure package unless Republicans have more of a voice in the negotiation process than they did with the coronavirus stimulus bill. Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has emerged as a critical swing vote in the narrowly divided Senate, said he would use his position as chairman of the Senate Energy Committee to hold up the legislation unless the GOP has input.

House Democrats introduced sweeping climate legislation Tuesday that would halt fossil fuel production on public lands for at least a year as the nation prepares to drastically cut climate-warming pollution from its own land holdings. The bill from the House Natural Resources Committee requires the Department of the Interior to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions on public lands by 2040. “The Trump administration is handing out drilling and coal mining leases like candy, and no thought is ever given by this administration to the climate change impacts,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) a sponsor of the bill as well as...

An Oregon climate change bill that prompted 12 Republican lawmakers to flee the Statehouse in Salem last week has hit yet another snag: Senate President Peter Courtney, a Democrat, announced Tuesday that the chamber did not have enough votes to pass the legislation. The cap-and-trade program intended to rein in industrial carbon emissions lost traction even with the state's Democratic senators, according to Courtney, sparking protesters who were initially demanding that Republicans return to the floor for a vote to begin chanting "Peter Courtney's got to go." "I've done as much as I can, and I'll continue to try," Courtney...

Montevideo (AFP) - Latin America will demand that the richest and most polluting countries foot the bill for reducing harmful emissions at the world climate summit starting Monday. Countries in one of the world's poorest and most environmentally diverse regions have failed to agree on many things and do not have a common negotiating position overall going into the talks

The Senate climate bill has been at death’s door several times over the past year. But with the days before the August recess quickly slipping away, the case may truly be terminal now. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has wanted to introduce a sweeping energy and climate bill by next week, and Reid even told POLITICO on Monday night that the package was almost ready to go. But by Tuesday afternoon, Reid was noncommittal about when a bill would come or what it would contain. “We’re going to make a decision in the near future,” Reid said, describing plans...

The Senate sponsors of a sweeping climate change bill are drafting a scaled-back version focused on electric power plants in a bid to salvage a role for greenhouse gas curbs in the Senate energy debate. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) this week will start circulating a draft of their narrowed plan as they try to convince Democratic leaders to include a carbon pricing component in a broad energy package that may hit the Senate floor next week. “I am very optimistic that we can pass something here that deals with energy and gets us started in the...

Political reaction yesterday to Presi dent Obama's prime-time Gulf oil spill speech was surprisingly biparti san: Democrats and Republicans alike thought the address was a dud. Especially when Obama veered from the spill and -- in true Rahm Emanuel "never let a crisis go to waste" style -- began pitching his energy-regulation scheme. Which essentially amounts to the discredited notion of cap-and-trade (though Obama, at his pollster's urging, no longer uses the term, which more accurately should be called cap-and-tax, anyway). "If my house is on fire, I don't need the fire chief telling me that I shouldn't have built...

Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) unveiled a compromise climate bill Wednesday, hoping public concern over the massive oil spill in the gulf will boost the measure's long-shot chances for passage. While the bill is different from the House-passed climate bill in several respects -- it seeks carbon reductions from separate sectors of the economy rather than imposing a nationwide cap, and it provides more incentives for both new nuclear power and offshore oil drilling -- it still faces a steep hill in attracting the 60 votes needed for passage. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)...

We all remember how painful it was when gasoline prices surged past four bucks a gallon a couple years ago. The price is now around $3 a gallon. That steep sum will seem like chump change if global-warming alarmists in Congress have their way. Long-anticipated climate-change legislation is scheduled to be unveiled in the Senate today. The ostensible purpose is to clean the air by cutting carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. If the bill becomes law, though, consumers will get smoked as they are forced to pay more for a fill-up. Backers of this measure are...

The 210,000-gallon-a-day oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico may soon claim another victim: the climate-change bill. It’s ironic. But it’s true, nonetheless. Climate-change legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting clean energy is at risk because of an oil spill.

NLPC is sponsoring a PepsiCo shareholder proposal asking for a report on the company’s lobbying priorities. At the PepsiCo annual tomorrow in Plano, Texas, I will argue that the company’s lobbying priorities are seriously out of whack. I will cite PepsiCo’s membership in U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of corporations and environmental groups. USCAP’s mission is to “quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” The House of Representatives has obliged in the form of the Waxman-Markey bill that would destroy over 1.1 million jobs, hike electricity rates 90 percent, and reduce the...

Monday's unveiling of a compromise Senate climate bill was postponed on Saturday, Democratic Senator John Kerry said, after a dispute arose over unrelated immigration reform legislation. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said earlier on Saturday he would have to pull out of the bipartisan climate change effort because of concerns Democrats would push forward with a debate on immigration reform, rather than the climate change bill, in the Senate. Kerry said he hoped to keep working for passage of a climate bill. He said that after more than six months of detailed meetings with Graham and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, "we...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Details of an oil industry tax are being filled in Congress as part of an upcoming U.S. climate control bill, sparking a spirited lobbying campaign this week over how the revenues from that tax would be used. A Senate source familiar with the draft legislation told Reuters that the new fee "will be assessed at the terminal rack," — where refined oil products await shipment to retail gasoline stations and other end points. But the source added that no final decisions had yet been made on whether revenues from the tax would be deposited into the Highway...

Although they never should have been a part of it in the first place, three major companies have exited the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of corporations and environmental groups. USCAP’s mission is to “quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” The House has obliged and the result, the Waxman-Markey bill, is too strong for both the Senate and the American people. Instead of taking a principled stand against massive government intervention in the energy economy, corporate executives argued that global warming legislation was coming anyway, so it was better to...

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday said that there is room on the busy Senate calendar to bring up a sweeping energy and climate change bill this spring. His comments – in a speech before a geothermal energy group in New York – come amid speculation that tackling controversial plans to impose limits on greenhouse gases may fall by the wayside. “We have a lot on our plate. We have to finish reforming health insurance and Wall Street, and also must help bring Americans out of unemployment. But we are not so busy that we can’t find the time...

The perils of steering a climate bill through the Senate in an election year have been well-documented in this space and elsewhere. Getting a bill back through the House, which narrowly approved a sweeping measure in June, might not be a picnic either. Take Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who chairs the House Agriculture Committee. Back in June, Peterson blocked the bill before winning a series of concessions to the agriculture industry. This included language that blocks EPA from weighing certain land use changes when measuring the “lifecycle” greenhouse gas emissions of ethanol. He voted for the bill. But now Peterson says...

An aggressive White House push on jobs and deficit reduction in 2010 may be yet another sign that climate-change legislation will stay on the back burner next year. “There is a growing chorus in the party that thinks we should be doing more to spur job creation and not necessarily tackle cap and trade right now,” said a moderate Democratic Senate aide. White House officials told POLITICO on Friday that President Barack Obama plans curb new domestic spending beyond jobs programs and focus on cutting the federal deficit next year. In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid has hinted that...

LONDON (Reuters) - U.N. negotiators will next month put farming onto the radar of climate regulations for the first time, but governments face aggressive lobbies and gaps in the science proving the extent of agricultural emissions. "They're lucky to have got away with it this far, it should be included in a U.S. climate bill and in Copenhagen," said Robert Goodland, formerly of the World Bank and co-author of a report which last month caused a stir by estimating that farm livestock account for 51 percent of all global greenhouse gases. The estimate included carbon emissions from burning trees to...