WRAP UP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
12/14/12

IN CONGRESS

Recently-elected Senate Democrats Martin Heinrich (N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) will be joining the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the new Congress, the party’s Senate leadership said this week. The Democratic Steering Committee, the panel in charge of making committee assignments for the party, also confirmed the widely-expected news that Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) will be taking the reigns as chairman of the committee, a post being vacated by longtime leader Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) later this month as he retires. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a vocal energy efficiency advocate, is the only current member leaving the committee, Democrats confirmed. She will instead be claiming a slot on the powerful Appropriations Committee, they said.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is starting a climate change caucus, the Hill newspaper reported this week. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman said that Hurricane Sandy has put the issue back in people’s minds. “I am going to form a climate change caucus, because people are coming up to me, they really want to get into this. I think Sandy changed a lot of minds,” she said. The move could mean more pressure to move forward on carbon legislation, even though the issue still appears to largely be politically dead on Capitol Hill. Boxer attempted to shepherd cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate in 2009 and 2010 but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Top Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested that the panel’s Republican leadership call a hearing based on the findings of a recent report that found that achieving the global warming limit set by the United Nations is “highly unrealistic.” In a Dec. 11 letter, Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Power Subcommittee Ranking Member Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) called on their Republican counterparts, Fred Upton (Mich.) and Ed Whitfield (Ky.), to examine a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers report’s “compelling and urging findings” on global warming in a hearing. The report concludes that the chances of staying under the 2°C global temperature increase limit set by the U.N. is very limited and that the world would have to achieve an unprecedented level of decarbonization to reach that goal. “This report underscores that delaying action to address carbon pollution is rapidly escalating the effort that will be necessary to avoid the most dangerous degree of warming as well as the amount of warming that is essentially unavoidable,” Waxman and Rush wrote.