CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

S. 3036 – Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act

The Administration believes that climate change is an important issue and is taking significant domestic and international actions to address it. As Congress debates this important issue, it must recognize that bad legislation would raise fuel prices and raise taxes on Americans without accomplishing the important goals the Administration shares. This debate should be guided by certain core principles and a clear appreciation that there is a right way and a wrong way to approach reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The right way is:

to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology, while increasing our energy security and ensuring growth in our economy;
to adopt policies that spur investment in new technologies needed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without unreasonable burdens on consumers and workers;
to expand emission-free nuclear power generation and encourage the investments necessary to produce electricity from coal without releasing carbon into the air;
to ensure that all major economies are bound to take action and to work cooperatively with our partners for a fair and effective international climate agreement;
to lower trade barriers and create a global free market for clean energy technologies, making advanced technology more affordable and available in the developing world; and
to prevent the misapplication of other environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, not designed to address greenhouse gases as part of any new GHG specific framework.

The wrong way, as reflected by S. 3036 and the Boxer Amendment, is:

to sharply raise the price of gas, raise taxes, or demand drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy;
to impose burdensome new mandates on top of ones that were enacted just last year;
to leave limitations on nuclear power generation and waste disposal unaddressed;
to establish unrealistic timeframes for massively restructuring the economy that assume the use of technologies not yet developed or demonstrated to be economically feasible;
to create a system that will squeeze household income, cost many jobs, reduce growth in the economy, impose a huge new tax, and create uncontrolled spending;
to take unilateral action that will undercut efforts to get developing countries to limit their emissions while having negligible effect on GHG concentrations and global temperatures;
to impose counterproductive provisions that could ignite a carbon-based trade war; and
to allow the misapplication of a patchwork of 30-year-old laws that were not designed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

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