Republicans warm up to emissions cuts

WASHINGTON – Republicans who have historically dismissed calls for federal action on global warming are now seeing a political benefit to embracing some curbs on heat-trapping gases, prompting a flurry of Capitol Hill negotiations that could ultimately shift the nation’s policies on climate change.

This transformation will be on full display as early as next week, when several senators are expected to jockey to try to attach rival climate change proposals to the Senate energy bill. Three factions – John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. – are offering competing plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which have been linked to global warming.

“We need to deal with global warming, not only because it’s the right thing to do, it’s the smart political and diplomatic thing to do,” said Hagel, who has written three bills with Democrats aimed at promoting development of clean technology at home or abroad. “There is some political payoff in this.”

While most environmentalists see this as a sign of progress, some are worried the Senate may adopt a weak climate change proposal that would undermine more meaningful attempts to cut heat-trapping gases in the United States. The McCain-Lieberman proposal would establish a cap-and-trade system that, in the worst-case scenario, would in 2010 freeze carbon emissions at their then-levels. Bingaman’s bill calls for carbon emitters to slow their emissions to mid-2012 levels by 2020, with the provision that industry could buy its way out of the cap if carbon credits become prohibitively expensive. Hagel’s package includes voluntary limits and aims to cut carbon emissions by offering generous incentives for technological development and climate research.