L.A. congressman's global warming bill could hit poor hardest

As the state of California and Los Angeles continue to suffer under a crushing recession, Los Angeles Democratic congressman Henry Waxman is sponsoring a global-warming bill that could cost consumers an average of $1,500 a year in higher energy bills.

The bill, dubbed "Waxman-Markey," would create a cap-and-trade program to regulate "greenhouse gas emissions" that critics charge is nothing more than an expensive tax on businesses that will be passed along to consumers.

President Obama has hailed the bill as necessary to "create millions of new jobs all across America."

But the bill is being attacked from the left side of the aisle as well. Environmentalists say it doesn't charge industries enough.

Waxman-Markey, meet House Ag Committee | Grist

By all accounts, Thursday’s House Ag Committee hearing on the Waxman-Markey climate-change legislation went as expected: angry men blustered and fulminated and generally vented spleen. (See the Wall Street Journal’s coverage here and here; Farm Policy blog’s summary; and here’s links to the testimony of the hearing’s carefully selected witnesses.)

Grist’s Kate Sheppard attended the hearing. She tells me that Committee members, especially Republicans, spent considerable time airing their doubts about whether climate change exists at all. Mostly, though, the farm-states’ finest got down to business: demanding that the legislation be tailored to reward the industry they more or less unapologetically represent: the agrichemical firms that dominate U.S. agriculture. Their agenda, as I laid out earlier this week, essentially rests on funneling carbon credits to a practice known to critics as “chemical no-till,” which sequesters little if any carbon but burns through copious amounts of Monsanto’s blockbuster herbicide Roundup.