Senate Democratic leaders in charge of the push behind climate change legislation have made clear the concessions they are willing to make to gain the few Republican votes likely needed for passage of a bill.
John Kerry (D-Mass.) laid it all out in a New York Times Op-Ed piece co-authored with Lindsey Graham (R-S.C), who is the first Republican Senator to give his support to a climate change bill with the following compromises:
- support for increasing U.S. nuclear power production
- new financial incentives for "clean coal" (a.k.a. carbon capture and sequestration)
- additional onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration
In addition, Kerry and Graham wrote that the U.S. would need to consider a border tax on goods produced in developing nations that do not have environmental protections in place. This is likely to disrupt international climate change negotiations, because China and India say that such taxes reverse the premise of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is designed to allow developing countries to catch up (so to speak), while rich nations pay the price for widespread environmental degradation that has taken place since the industrial revolution.
Read Kerry and Graham’s full Op-Ed piece at the link below.
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