Why did Senate Republicans filibuster the Lieberman-Warner carbon cap and trade bill?

Question

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a global warming bill that would have required major reductions in greenhouse gases, pushing debate over the world's biggest environmental concern to next year for a new Congress and president.

Democratic leaders fell a dozen votes short of getting the 60 needed to end a Republican filibuster on the measure and bring the bill up for a vote, prompting Majority Leader Harry Reid to pull the legislation from consideration.

The Senate debate focused on bitter disagreement over the expected economic costs of putting a price on carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas that comes from burning fossil fuels. Opponents said it would lead to higher energy costs.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080606/ap_on_go_co/climate_congress

So yeah I understand the Republicans are (wrongfully) concerned about the economic costs, but why block a vote on the bill entirely? Why shelve the whole issue until next year?

Answer 1

Sounds like they're trying to prevent raising taxes until their beloved 'W' is out of office.

Answer 2

It's an election year.  Present all the polls you want.  Carpet bomb the masses with 24/7 dire warnings of impending warm weather.  Fact of the matter remains:  Politicians want to keep their jobs.  Republicans voting to raise taxes/impede business = unemployed RINOs

Answer 3

What a load of cr@p being fed to us by the so called 'opponents' of this bill... as if the costs of doing nothing outweigh the cost of taking meaningful action.

Ah... isn't it too late anyway... sigh...

Hypocritical if you ask me for GWB to get up there and make those ridiculous claims about the costs and impacts - once again we're the suckers getting bamboozled by ridiculous "raising taxes!!!!" campaigns.  No one in this Answer has bothered to even read or understand the bill - or who will be taxed...

But to hear you all *****!n about the costs... which are an effen spit in the bucket compared to y'all's deadly little occupation war - GWB actually used the term "mortgage our children's future..."

Those effen jerks - and the lot of ya spewing out the labels and party speak- yeah it's cool to keep your head in the sand and be disgusting and listen to puke on the radio.

Seriously - folks with at least half a brain need to band together to fight the ignorant scourge that tracks all these GW questions and fills our screens with more of the same knee-jerk limbaugh-hannity bullsh!t.  They'll believe anything we tell them as long as we use the right code words like:

Taxes, right to life, big government, liberals, etc...

Answer 4

Let's start with the fact that it would raise the Price of gas about $.50 a gallon. Then there is the massive job loss when they would be moved overseas to save on taxes. Gee, I wonder why?  That is about as intelligent as saying that the way to cut gas prices is to tax the oil companies. Pure brilliance.

Answer 5

Because it would raise gas prices by at least $1.40 a gallon according to the Epa.  It would result in at least 500,000 lost jobs, higher energy costs, a $4.8 trillion loss by 2030, electricity prices will rise 44%, and it will be the largest restructuring of government since the new deal.  There is trillions of dollars in special interest money in it.

All to decrease the temperature by a whopping few tenths of a degree.

Answer 6

Funny you should post this question. Can you name anything that the repugs did for the benefit of the people ?

Answer 7

Greetings!

Time to clean the House and Senate of obstructionists and lobbyist puppets who don`t mind taking our Tax dollars FOR themselves, but refuse to let us spend it ON ourselves.

We already have high costs, and for no good reason except Oil companies executives who want more, more, more.

I like the "separation of science and politics" comment!

Let`s get the names of the obstructionists, and blog their constituents.

/!\

Answer 8

Flush out your head gear Berkely Boy.  It's the perfect implementation for American Bolshevism, disguised as the new religion of "consensus science".  Doesn't our Constitution provide for a seperation of science and politics (at least east of the San Andreas fault and outside the Beltway)?

Answer 9

The bill is a joke. That's why.

Answer 10

Funny - Democrats control both houses.  There is nothing repubs can do to stop a bill.

If the d'rats fell a dozen votes short, they should address the members in their own party who voted against this bill.

Funny- I couldn't stop laughing at the thought of d'rats voting against this bill, then placing blame on the repubs!  That requires some brass ones!

Answer 11

Republicans are in general against tax grabs.  If your concern is about AGW then issue tax reductions to go with the tax increases.  But then again politicians do not care about global warming, they only care about raising taxes.

Answer 12

Wow, wrongfully exclude economic concerns?  Economics govern everything, and has since Cro-Magnon invented it 160,000 years ago.  To ignore it or will fully dismiss it as inconsequential should be criminal malfeasance.

Now on the political, Bush, McCain, and Obama would have vetoed such a bill, and they need look no further than the UK to see voter discontent with "green taxes".  Political Suicide, but the authors knew full well the bill was DOA.  It's just political posturing to make people like yourself think someone cares, and in fact you are just a calculation in a political equation.

Answer 13

Because it will raise taxes (never ever a good thing) and unnecessarily increase energy costs. Pretty  much a no brainer to vote against it.

Answer 14

That is the way the Senate works, always has been, always will be.

If I were the Senate minority leader (Republican right now) I would have filibustered this bill as well.  I have no faith that President Bush would veto this bill.

Answer 15

Ummmmm, to prevent massive government intrusion into the economy on the pretext of changing the weather?

All along you AGW believers have insisted "oh, it's not about new taxes and regulation," but then what do you do when your party takes over the Congress?   You propose ....... new taxes and regulation!

Meanwhile the temperature keeps dropping.......

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/200...

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/200...

.....and the temperature increase had a lot more to do with the urban heat island effect than anything else:

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/

Edit: beelnite, the Iraq war hasn't cost $1TN yet.   The cost of this bill is $45TN.    Yes, perhaps the $1TN was a waste but it's 1/45th of the cost of the global warming bill.

Answer 16

There are some of us who do not think bankrupting our nation while the EU, china, India, all of south America are able to go on with business as usual which they are today and will be so doing tomorrow.

I understand that you have no concerns for those of us who must work and earn a living, at least there are a few people who still do.

When obama is in, and he and you have your way and at that point no one is working anymore, who will you tax then?

Answer 17

Because it is an election year, and republicans have to get their campaign contributions from Big Oil and Big Coal and conservative think tanks.

Answer 18

Because this bill will be a disaster. THank God some politicians have a brain.

Answer 19

I'm going to be looking in the op-ed in tomorrow's paper to see what coverage this gets.  Because I don't know why it was pulled, except that Reid's a pretty shrewd fellow and he had his reasons.  I'm sure he'll be speaking out about his decision and the fate of the bill. Maybe on the weekend news programs?

That said, I agree with Jello that the blame on this is shared by Republicans and Democrats.  But it is possible that by forcing a vote, voters would have a chance to see where politicians stood on this before the election.  So politicians can step back and gauge public reaction to this and act accordingly.  A 'see which way the political winds are blowing' kind of thing.

So what I expect out of this is a bigger better bill, and a better job from politicians of any persuasion at informing the public and their own.  To quote from the movie "Network," I'm mad as h**l, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Answer 20

Because they didn't want to merely make consumers pay more money without some kind of meaningful progress on substituting something for imported or domestic oil.

Something such as the 32 nuclear reactors and 17,000 wind turbines the International Energy Agency thinks we should build EACH YEAR to halt global warming.

Answer 21

They don't want to shelve it until next year.  They simply want a few more subsidies inserted for their special interest pals who gave them "campaign financing".  Bush will probably hold the bill hostage for a few concessions as well.

These types of tactics could continue for months, but at some point the Democrats will get close enough to next year that they'll shelve it and pass whatever they like next year, so Republicans have incentive to move on the bill sooner rather than later.  

The result will probably be the typical compromise favoring the majority party, with plenty of added waste tucked into by both parties.  I predict that the final bill will include plenty of subsidies to the timber industry, oil exploration industry, oil refineries, etc..paying them to do what they should be doing anyway.  They pay congressmen to get the carrots, so citizens are left with the stick.

A much healthier way to incent appropriate behavior would be to define a midpoint for each desireable metric in each industry, having entities below the midpoint pay dividends to the best performing ones.  It incents positive changes and helps the most efficient players recoup the costs they incurred to get to their leadership position.  Set the bar every 5 or 10 years so there's a reasonable planning and project implementation horizon.  

This has been discussed on the consumer side for things like auto MPG but where it would really make a difference would be electric utilities.

I'd sure like to see an in depth anaysis of the details in Leiberman Warner.  Shouldn't we examine in detail what exacty Lieberman Warner is before we obsess about whether or not it's passing?  Who knows what is being shoved under those covers....