Links tagged “capandtrade”

Senator Manchin's 2010 campaign ad shotting Cap-and-Trade bill. 

The senator who once put a bullet through the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill for a campaign ad will become an even more important gatekeeper on climate change this year. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin will take over the Energy and Natural Resources Committee as soon as next week as his party promises to push increasingly ambitious ideas against global warming.

Manchin: "I am an all-in energy person. I want to use all the resources we have. My first and foremost thing on this Energy Committee is to do everything I can to maintain energy independence in the United States of America...I think Joe Biden understands that there is going to be fracking in this country if we are to be energy independent, and there is a better, cleaner way of doing it."

After weeks of intense negotiations, eight Republican legislators voted for the measure to ensure its passage. The Senate leader described the measure as the most affordable method to reach the state’s ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. “Let’s demonstrate to our children, to generations to come, to the rest of the nation, to Washington as well as the world, that California will always be the leader when it comes to climate action,” de León said.

President Obama says he should have "moved faster to a nonlegislative strategy" to address climate change after Congress killed cap-and-trade legislation in 2009. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Obama criticized "folks like John McCain," who he said once backed cap-and-trade proposals but reversed their position and undermined congressional efforts. “I think the biggest problem we had was folks like John McCain, who had come out in favor of a cap-and-trade system, getting caught up in a feverish opposition to anything I proposed and reversing themselves — which meant that getting the numbers that we needed was going to be too difficult,” the president said in the interview published Wednesday.

Gore in 1992: 'No government mandated requirements would be necessary of any kind, that we could all but meet the goal with purely voluntary measures'