'This is the moment': House vote on landmark climate bill set for Friday

The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on landmark climate legislation this Friday. The American Clean Energy and Security Act would create a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions, bringing them below 1990 levels by 2020.



With the vote approaching, opponents of the bill are stepping up their attacks. Prominent among them are American Solutions for Winning the Future, an advocacy group led by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and co-founded by billionaire businessmen including Roger Milliken, heir to a South Carolina textile fortune and longtime patron of conservative causes.

The group -- which was also behind the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" campaign to promote offshore oil and gas drilling -- blasts the ACES bill as an "energy tax" in a TV ad it's currently airing. American Solutions, which says it has collected more than 123,000 signatures on a petition against the bill, points to a study by the conservative, pro-business Heritage Foundation to back up its claims that the legislation would be enormously expensive and wreck the economy.

But those claims are called into question by a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which finds that the legislation would cost the average U.S. household only $175 a year by 2020 -- and would actually benefit the poorest 20% of households by $40 per year. The richest 20% of households would experience a net cost of about $245 per year, according to the study.

But some argue that the CBO actually overstates the bill's costs by failing to fully account for its benefits. They include energy issues blogger A Siegel, who like many grassroots clean-energy advocates is critical of the legislation, which they feel unreasonably rewards polluters and isn't aggressive enough in limiting pollution. Writing at Daily Kos, Siegel points out that the CBO's analysis doesn't consider what he calls "systems-of-systems" implications -- such as the fact that the bill would create jobs, thus easing demand on government services, and improve health and increase productivity by cutting pollution.

"The $175 figure is, if anything, pessimistic," he writes.

And then there are the considerable costs of failing to address greenhouse gas pollution, such as damage to industries and the inundation of roads and other infrastructure caused by flooding and continued sea level rise. For example, consider this map that was included in the recent federal report about the potential U.S. impact of climate change, showing the projected flooding of more than 2,000 miles of roads along the U.S. Gulf Coast due to projected sea-level rise under medium- and high-emission scenarios:

With the House vote approaching, the climate bill's opponents aren't the only ones stepping up their game, though: Proponents of the legislation are also intensifying lobbying efforts.

Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore of Tennessee was the lead speaker in a national conference call held earlier this week by the Alliance for Climate Protection, a group he chairs whose Repower America campaign has been running its own TV ad -- a decidedly cheerier spot promoting clean energy that features a plainspoken rancher talking about "borrowing money to buy oil from dictators that don't like us, and burning it in ways that kill God's green earth."

The call, which reportedly drew more than 11,000 participants nationwide, ended with a pitch to participants to record a message for their congressional representatives urging them to support the bill. The group is also asking supporters to call their representatives through the organization by calling 1-877-9-REPOWER.

"This is the moment," Gore told the participants. "America must act today. The rest of the world is waiting for our cue and our lead. Our economy and our planet cannot afford to wait."