Urgent - Tell Congress: No climate bill   :)

Congress is voting on the climate change bill. Call Congress now and tell your representative to stand up to corporate polluters.

http://action.citizen.org/t/6693/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27505

Last month, you urged your representative to resist corrupt influence and strengthen climate change legislation pending in Congress. Public Citizen helped to organize more than 40 organizations in seeking stronger climate legislation. Our plea to lawmakers was ignored; the legislation has been further compromised to accommodate the interests of big energy corporations.

Now is the time to raise your voice again and tell Congress loud and clear: Stand up to corporate polluters and deliver effective climate legislation that will protect us for generations to come.

On Friday, the American Clean Energy and Security Act will come to the House floor for a critical vote. Please call and urge your representative to support efforts to strengthen HR 2454.

As written, this legislation will not solve our climate crisis but will enrich already powerful oil, coal and nuclear power companies.

President Obama got it right when he announced in February his plan to impose strict new limits on greenhouse gas emissions and require polluters to pay. But HR 2454 enshrines a new legal right to pollute and gives away 85 percent of the credits to that right to polluters. Science has spoken; NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, has called HR 2454 a sham and contends the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere must be reduced to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Unfortunately, the proposed policy does not reflect scientific reality. The measure would allow a quantity of greenhouse gas emissions so high that 20 climate scientists recently warned the Obama administration and Congress that global warming will spin out of control if this bill is passed. They called targets in the bill "inadequate to sustain the integrity of global climate and to hold the risk of ruinous climatic change to an acceptably low level."

Please urge your representative to do the following:

1. Listen to the scientists, not the lobbyists, and cut global warming emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

2. Require polluters to pay for emissions credits - don't hand them out for free, thereby providing financial windfalls to coal and oil power plant owners. The nuclear utility Exelon bragged this week to investors that the climate bill will provide it $1 billion in extra profit per year. In addition, giving away allowances deprives the government of money needed to invest in clean technologies.

3. Don't rely on Wall Street to get climate change right. Under the bill, the price of pollution would be determined by a trillion-dollar derivatives market that could be similar to the one that helped sink our economy into its current depressed state.

4. Boost the amount of renewable energy utilities must use. The first draft of the bill would have required utilities to produce 25 percent of their power from renewable energy by 2025; that figure has shrunk to 20 percent, and additional loopholes prompted the American Wind Energy Association to conclude that the renewable standard will result in "effectively zero" new renewables.

5. Remove the "carbon tax" that households would have to pay. This pot of money would be controlled by the utilities and used to fund only carbon capture projects by coal utilities. The bill doesn't, but should, provide money to help homeowners pay for such as things as weatherization or to receive rebates for rooftop solar.

6. Protect consumers - not utility profits. The legislation's primary "consumer protection" provision distributes free pollution allowances to electric and natural gas utilities with the assumption that the 50 different state utility commissions will redirect all that money back to consumers. But there's a reason corporate utilities have called this provision "critical": they understand that they will be able to direct a portion of that money to their shareholders instead. Public Citizen supports directing money directly to households as President Obama proposed earlier this year.

How did we get such a bad bill? Big money was the deciding factor in this process, with the energy industry donating $3.1 million to all members of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 2008 campaign cycle.

The bill approved by the committee is hardly the transformation this country needs. Tell Congress we deserve better.​

Thank you for all you do,
Allison Fisher
Public Citizen's Energy Program

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