WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – President Barack Obama scored a major victory yesterday when the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to slash industrial pollution that is blamed for global warming.
The Democratic-controlled House passed the climate change bill, a top priority for Obama, by a vote of 219-212. As has become routine on major bills in Congress this year, the vote was partisan, with only eight Republicans joining Democrats for the bill. Forty-four Democrats voted against it.
Climate change legislation still must get through the Senate. Senators were expected to try to write their own version but prospects for this year were uncertain.
After the House vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he hoped the Senate can pass a bill “this fall.”
Obama praised the House for taking “historic action” and urged the Senate to act. “It’s a bold and necessary step that holds the promise of creating new industries and millions of new jobs, decreasing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said.
With the House action, Obama will be able to tout significant progress toward tackling global warming after years of foreign countries criticizing Washington for not participating in international efforts.
The bill requires that large U.S. companies, including utilities, oil refiners, manufacturers and others, reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. They would do so by phasing in the use of cleaner alternative energy than high-polluting oil and coal.
At the core of the bill, which is around 1,500 pages long, is a “cap and trade” program designed to achieve the emissions reductions by industry.
Under the plan, the government would issue a declining number of pollution permits to companies, which could sell those permits to each other as needed.
Republicans said the bill was a behemoth that would neither effectively help the environment nor improve an economy reeling from a deep recession.
House Republican leader John Boehner called the measure “the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives.”
Representative Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee that played a key role in the bill, said it would set unrealistic targets for cutting carbon pollution. “You would have to reduce emissions in the United States to the level that we had in 1910,” Barton said.
Both predicted higher prices for energy and other consumer goods and more U.S. jobs being shipped abroad as companies try to avoid the tough pollution-control requirements. Democrats said consumers mostly would be protected from price hikes.
