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Boucher brokers climate change bill compromise

Published May 15th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Virginia U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher played an instrumental role in moving a global climate change bill forward after “intensive negotiations” to hammer out a compromise measure.

“On Thursday we were able to reach tentative agreement on the outlines of the measure that will enable it to move through the (House) Energy and Commerce Committee,” Boucher said Friday. “I am going to seek additional improvements, but for the purposes of committee approval, we have now reached agreement.”

Federal controls on greenhouse gas emissions were “inevitable” after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled two years ago they must be regulated. Boucher said the court mandated the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate greenhouse gases unless Congress stepped up.

“So the only choice that remains is whether EPA regulates or Congress regulates. Virtually everybody from industry to the environmental community would rather have Congress do it. We simply can do a better and more balanced job of it,” he said.

“Given that reality the last two years, I have been working to establish an economically digestible regulatory program.”

Boucher said he has worked with coal industry and electric utility officials and the United Mine Workers of America, “and all the people I just named are in agreement the bill we just negotiated should move through the committee.”

Boucher said he has been serving as lead negotiator to hammer out a bill with Committee Chairman U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif, and “he and I have been involved the last six weeks in intensive negotiations that have been continuous. We probably have 50 hours of direct conversations about the climate change matter, our staffs have met and devoted hundreds of hours to this work, and the agreement we have achieved is a landmark accomplishment, but subject to further improvement as the process matures.”

Of high concern to Boucher was a healthy future for the coal industry and coal-related jobs, and people who live in regions where electricity is generated by coal.

“We have achieved a number of successes,” he said, including a program originated by Boucher to accelerate funding for clean coal technology research and development, particularly carbon capture and sequestration. Included in the compromise is a $1 billion annual fund directed to developing the technology over a 10-year period.

“We also achieved success attaining the provision of emission allowances to utilities for free, so they will not have to buy those allowances at an auction, and that will significantly hold down electricity prices in regions like Southwest Virginia where most of our electricity is coal-fired,” he said.

The compromise also includes a “generous program of offsets so utilities like American Electric Power can invest in forestry, agriculture and other carbon dioxide sinks as a way to reduce CO2 emissions,” Boucher said. “There are 2 billion tons of offsets available under our compromise annually. Some of those offsets can be the preservation of tropical rain forests that contribute about 20 percent of global CO2 emissions.”

“These will be affordable approaches the utilities can take in order to comply with the program and continue to use coal,” he said. “My goal was to pull down electricity prices, preserve jobs in the coal industry, create a way forward for ever-increasing volumes of coal sales, and assure the measure is sustainable by the American economy, and I think the compromise is a major step forward achieving that result.”

Waxman initially wanted a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, Boucher said, and the bill still in committee shaves that to 17 percent. Boucher said he believes that goal should be lowered another 3 percent.

“In my view a 14 percent reduction is a more appropriate number and will further our goal of keeping electricity prices low, preserving coal jobs and increasing coal sales, so I will be pushing for the 14 percent number after the bill leaves the committee and goes to the floor for consideration,” he said. “We will also work with our colleagues in the U.S. Senate as they begin their consideration on this issue. I have already had an opportunity to brief (Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.) on the measure we are developing in the House.”

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