Advancing the Climate Change Debate

 

 

By Thomas J. Donohue, President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

 

Last month the Senate, in one of the most important votes of the year, rejected the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, commonly known as Lieberman-Warner. Consumers, workers, and businesses can all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

 

Lieberman-Warner is the wrong approach. Its complex carbon cap and trade formula would force consumers to stop using fossil fuels without providing suitable replacements. Many of the clean technologies and alternative energy sources called for in the legislation either do not exist or are not commercially available in quantities necessary to meet growing energy demand.

 

Lieberman-Warner would impose a vast, intrusive layer of new and costly regulations and place the burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the United States alone. The price tag of the approach prescribed in Lieberman-Warner is a new federal bureaucracy, higher energy prices, millions of lost jobs, and a $5 trillion transfer of wealth from business to government.

 

No one expected Lieberman-Warner to be enacted this year, but the debate does lay down important markers for the battles to come next with a new president and Congress. The Chamber wants to be a leader in devising commonsense, effective, and realistic solutions to climate change. Responsible climate change policy will preserve economic growth and competitiveness, impose realistic timetables for efficiency improvements and the mandated use of new technology, and take a global approach that calls for action from all the world's major greenhouse gas emitters.