Significant Improvements Needed to Lieberman-Warner Bill

Sierra Club Looks to Full Committee Markup to Strengthen Bill

November 1 , 2007 -- (Washington, D.C.)--Today a subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 4-3 to move the America’s Climate Security Act (S. 2191), introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA), to the full committee for hearings and a markup. The committee’s chairwoman, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), has announced plans to move the legislation forward rapidly.

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Statement of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director

"We are pleased that today’s subcommittee markup included incremental changes to improve the bill and we will continue to work vigorously to strengthen this proposal as it moves forward. While we support moving the bill into full committee, it unfortunately still falls far short of what science requires and what economic fairness demands and thus we cannot yet offer our support for the bill. Just as bold action is needed to address the challenge of global warming, bold changes will need to be made to this legislation before we are able to support it. Our support is not contingent on perfection, but rather on whether a bill offers us a reasonably good chance of achieving our widely shared goals: preventing catastrophic global warming and bringing a clean energy future to life.

"It is essential that we get markets moving immediately to begin reducing our emissions and speed our transition to the clean energy economy. This can only be achieved by setting a strong, science-based short-term target--a 15-20 percent reduction in total emissions by 2020. The bar must also be set where science demands in the long-run--a reduction of 80 percent by 2050. Our window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate is rapidly closing--perhaps faster than any of us previously imagined--and this bill’s targets do not match up with the urgent challenge that scientists have lain before us.

"Polluters must pay for the damage they do to our climate--period. This bill continues to give hundreds of billions of dollars in allowances to polluters for far too long and also returns a significant portion of the proceeds from the allowances that are auctioned off right back to those same polluting industries. Instead of private windfalls, we must have a 100 percent auction or allocation for the public benefit to give us the funds we need in order to ensure a just transition for workers, protect consumers from rising energy costs, and make the investments in new technology needed to make the new clean energy economy a reality.

"Senator Boxer has provided exemplary leadership on this issue and has a stated goal of improving the bill. We very much look forward to working with her and other members of the committee to produce a bill that is sufficiently strong to address the challenge before us. Barring these significant changes, we do not believe that this bill should be enacted."

Source: Sierra Club