Climate Change Bill Faces Hurdles in the Senate

To pass climate change legislation in the House last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi needed 218 votes. She got 219: 211 Democrats plus 8 Republicans. By almost the narrowest of margins, the House voted to put a cap on the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Now the debate goes to the Senate, where passage will probably be just as tough. California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment Committee, is leading the effort and is trying, against stiff Republican opposition and concerns from within her own party, to move quickly. On Tuesday, Boxer held the first of several planned hearings on climate change legislation in her committee, and it was a predictably partisan affair.

But Boxer is already running into other obstacles. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he had decided to give Democrats more time to work on climate change legislation, pushing their deadline to late September. Boxer, who had hoped to pass a bill out of committee before Congress's August recess, will now most likely wait until after the recess to complete it. Several other Senate committees also want to have a say.

Boxer's starting point is the 1,400-plus-page House bill, written by Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Many of its core features, such as a cap-and-trade system requiring big polluters to hold permits for every ton of pollution they emit, should remain essentially intact in the Senate. Many of the tactics used in the House to cajole moderate Democrats to vote yes, such as handing out free pollution permits to powerful industries like electric utilities and oil refineries rather than requiring companies to buy them, will most likely return.

But the Senate presents special challenges. "Because there is such an overwhelming Democratic majority in the House, you could more or less enact the bill almost entirely on Democratic votes," says Nikki Roy, who monitors Congress for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "That's not remotely an option in the Senate, because you have to look beneath the partisan levels."

Roy counts at least nine Senate Republicans who have expressed some support for tackling climate change and more than 20 Senate Democrats from manufacturing or oil-producing states who worry about how the emissions limits would affect their state's industries. "These Democrats will have a hard time voting for this unless they see the Republicans in a serious bipartisan engagement," says Roy.

One area to watch is manufacturing. A last-minute addition in the House bill provides big bucks for U.S. manufacturers, creating a $30 billion loan fund to help build new facilities and "retool" existing ones to manufacture parts for clean-energy technologies. It originated with Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a moderate Democrat who is now asking the Senate to go even further to protect manufacturing, especially on trade matters. In fact, in the wee hours before the House vote, House leaders added other language to appease rust belt lawmakers who worry that jobs will go overseas if the bill boosts the cost of doing business in the United States. The new provisions let Congress tax cheaper goods coming from countries that won't adopt emissions limits.

But President Obama has balked at the tariff idea, warning it could send "protectionist signals." Some say he's just overreacting. "I think the administration's concerns are unfounded," says David Foster, executive director of the Blue Green Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups. The trade provisions wouldn't take effect until 2020, Foster says, "far enough in the future that it gives the parties in international negotiations ample opportunity to reach agreement."

For now, one thing seems certain: The administration, which let Waxman and Markey do much of the heavy lifting in the House, will be playing a much more active role in the Senate.