On Thursday, July 22, 2010, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced significant changes to the Senate’s climate change effort. Instead of a comprehensive bill, he now plans to bring a modest effort to the floor for vote next week, before the Senate adjourns for the August recess. Senate leadership had hoped to pass legislation that would have controlled carbon emissions through a carbon cap.
This change follows a series of postponements that have plagued the now-abandoned measure. After failure to garner sixty votes on industry wide caps on carbon, Senators Kerry and Lieberman, who had led the effort, announced their intentions to focus on a utilities-only cap, which would leave the transportation and manufacturing sectors out of the program for the time being. This scaled back version also failed to attain the sixty votes needed to avoid a filibuster on the Senate floor.
The new legislation proposed by Reid would contain four provisions:
• Stricter standards for offshore drilling operations
• Home Star program to provide rebates to consumers that improve the efficiency of their home heating and cooling
• Incentives for trucks to switch from diesel to natural gas
• Water conservation funding
It is important to note that this legislation does not include the bipartisan renewable portfolio standard which was passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last July. It is unclear at this point if this measure would likely be taken up after the election. The RPS is especially important to the solid waste industry as it contains incentives for states to utilize both waste-to-energy and landfill gas projects to reach their mandated renewable energy requirements.
We will continue to monitor this legislation and provide our members with updates as they occur.