Winners and Losers Emerging in Senate Climate Legislation

As the proposed climate change legislation being crafted by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joseph Lieberman, ID-Conn., nears completion, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Scott Brown, R-Mass., expressed their willingness to give the proposed bill an open-minded review, Reuters reported.

Alexander was quoted as saying: "A sector-by-sector approach [to reducing CO2 emissions] makes a lot more sense for dealing with carbon." He also said he would "consider a cap on utilities only if we could figure out the right way to do it that didn't drive costs up substantially over the short term." Brown was quoted as saying: "I'm open to reading anything."

On the other side, Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said expanded offshore gas and oil drilling provisions in the legislation could cost their votes.

Several issues in the legislation still needed to be ironed out, reported Reuters, including the allocation of future carbon pollution permits for electric power companies. A possible gasoline tax in the range of 15 cents a gallon, conceived with the input of some oil companies, Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips and favored by Graham, could also prove controversial, the Los Angeles Times reported. Oil companies, said the Times, had signed on to the proposal because they believed it would cost them less than other schemes to reduce GHG emissions. Resistance to the tax has come from some Democrats, and no other Republicans have stepped forward to support it.

Wrote the Times: "Proponents call the tax approach under consideration a 'linked fee,' because it links the extra cost for gasoline to the average cost of greenhouse gas emission permits created through a so-called cap-and-trade system for electric utilities." Backers of the tax proposal said they hoped it would help convince oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute to endorse the bill, or, at the least, not mount an ad campaign against it. Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the Bracewell & Giuliani, was quoted as saying: "It's not clear that a linked fee creates a path to 60 votes."