whitehouse

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s global-warming bill, many months in the making, is dead for this congress, but one of the senators involved in preparing it says the work wasn’t wasted.

The next president, whether Barack Obama or John McCain, is likely to sign into law a bill, based on the one that faltered last week in the Senate, that is meant to curb the pace of climate change, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview Wednesday.

Democrat Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which drafted the global-warming bill late last year under the chairmanship of Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal. Its chief sponsors were independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, of Connecticut, and Republican Sen. John W. Warner, of Virginia.

With the support of both presidential candidates and a majority of senators, they built the bill around a system known for short as “cap and trade.” Caps would be fixed on the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions that, say, a power company would be allowed to emit. Companies that could beat the targets could trade the remainder of their emission allowance on a newly created market.

“The simple essence of the proposition,” Whitehouse said, “is that the people who are polluting our atmosphere with carbon and warming up the planet won’t be able to do it any longer for free.”

As Whitehouse sees it, the program would bring two great boons for the economy as it slows the rate of global warming, limiting the rise of sea levels and other dangers. Most obvious would be the saving of the untold cost of repairing the catastrophic damage from floods and other global-warming effects, Whitehouse said.

In addition, Whitehouse foresees the program forcing a huge shift from imported oil to domestically produced fuel alternatives, plus energy conservation. While the effect on individual industries and classes of consumer will differ, he said that overall “it will prove to save money” against the cost of energy and other products rendered from foreign oil. The money spent on conservation and green-energy alternatives, he said, will stay in the American economy. Thus, Whitehouse argued, the new system will be an improvement over the status quo, under which the cost of fuel is “put on your credit card at the pump, bounced once on the books of Exxon-Mobil and then sent out to the Saudis.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, argued that the Lieberman-Warner bill amounted to a gigantic system of new tax levies on all kinds of industries. He said those costs will inevitably be passed onto consumers — an argument that prompted opponents to point to the likely political fallout from still-higher energy prices at the moment when $4-per-gallon gasoline has arrived. Opponents also expressed skepticism that, without such options as nuclear power and exploitation of domestic oil reserves, the global-warming bill wouldn’t generate anything like the volume of new energy sources that its supporters envision.

The Lieberman-Warner bill bogged down over a partisan dispute. But its supporting majority was not big enough to move it this year anyway; Senate rules allow foes of any measure to try to kill it by delay. It takes a majority of 60 votes to force consideration of any bill, and the global-warming bill fell short of that.

But Whitehouse said the exercise of writing the bill during this Congress will hasten the passage of a comparable one in the next. The compromise-driven process of drafting the bill in the environment committee, with ideas continually tested by votes on amendments, helped senators smooth out “rough patches” in a wide variety of areas. Votes in committee and the floor debate also “smoked a lot of people out” as to whether they would vote for the bill and, if not, what possible changes might bring them on board.

Whitehouse expressed particular satisfaction with two provisions that he helped work into the bill. One would send some of the proceeds of the new emissions-allowance market to studies of just how rising seas will affect coastal areas such as Rhode Island, in order to fashion useful adaptations.

Studies, for example, would be the effect of rising seas on “how tides move, how storm surges will work,” he said. “A little rise in sea level can make a big differenece because of the concentration of the surge as it, for instance, comes up Narragansett Bay running ahead of the storm.”

The mapping, studies and other information — along with inventories of shoreside industries, residential tracts, water-treatment plants and so on — could help leaders plan steps to prevent damage and otherwise adapt to rising seas.

Whitehouse also pointed to provisions of the bill that he said would ensure sound and honest dealing on a huge new market that, unregulated, might invite mischief.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com