From Green Right Now Reports
Health reform has gripped your attention and dominated your computer and TV screens for weeks now.
In case you’ve got little time to spare to study up on climate legislation coming down the pike soon after this huge debate, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has boiled it down to a summary report.
Get up to snuff on what the Kerry-Boxer bill, called the The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, by reading the Pew synopsis.
Willing to dig deeper? See Sen. John Kerry’s website for summaries by section of the bill. It’s written in even plainer English and makes it clear what’s in (natural gas and nuclear power) and what’s out (it does not raise the federal deficit by one single dime).
The bill developed as the Senate counterpart to the House’s Waxman-Markey climate bill, but it differs in key ways, for instance, focusing mainly on how to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Most notable, given the origins of the bill in the more conservative Senate, it aims higher, shooting for a 20 percent reduction in GHG from 2005 levels by 2020 compared with the Waxman-Markey goal of a 17 percent reduction for the same time frame.
The ultimate goal: An 83 percent reduction in GHG’s by 2050, just inching past the standard 80 percent reduction that scientists argue for.
After setting that critical threshold, the bill, like Waxman-Markey, aims to create clean energy jobs and promote energy security by underwriting local, renewable energy sources and installing a cap-and-trade system that puts a price on pollution.
(The authors are Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
