Kigali GHG Treaty Passes Senate Committee But Needs 17 GQP Votes To Be Enacted
A Senate committee voted yesterday to send the most important climate treaty in years to the floor for ratification. Not a single Republican opposed it. The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a voice vote, meaning that support for the agreement was overwhelming. It’s unclear when a floor vote will be scheduled for the treaty, which governs the global phase down of climate superpollutants used in cooling and refrigeration.
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Yet the tantalizing prospect of the Senate passing a major climate treaty raises questions about whether future climate bills could follow a similar path. Seventeen Republicans would have to vote to ratify the treaty. Is industry support and negligible opposition from Republicans the recipe for bipartisan climate action? And if it is, how many policies are likely to meet that kind of criteria? “There aren’t really many things that are big and easy,” said Rich Powell, CEO of ClearPath Action, a centrist group that works to advance clean energy. “We’re usually working on big and hard or small and easy.”
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The Kigali Amendment targets hydrofluorocarbons, the climate warming effect of which can be thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The agreement could save the world a half-degree Celsius of global warming — a down payment on the scientific imperative to keep post-industrial temperature rise to no more than 1.5 C. It’s the rare example of a significant climate policy that has not triggered partisan rancor. That’s likely because of overwhelming business sector support for the transition away from HFCs and toward their alternatives, which were developed by U.S. manufacturers.
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But Congress has never ushered major climate legislation into law. And the odds of doing so seem only to have lengthened in recent years — thus the Democrats’ current strategy of using a budget maneuver to pass climate legislation on a party-line vote in the Senate. Most wide-ranging climate policies that can deliver sweeping greenhouse gas reductions aren’t a win-win proposition like Kigali. Even efficient climate policies generally incur costs somewhere, raising concern among conservatives for whom government regulation can be antithetical.
“It’s difficult when you look at it as the zero-sum game that a lot of members do,” said Schrodt of the Niskanen Center. “I think that we would point to policies where the net is more positive than negative. But especially when you’re looking at economywide climate measures, it’s going to be virtually impossible to not have somebody on the opposite side of a policy.” The Niskanen Center backs a carbon tax, but Schrodt said smaller “bites at the apple” are the best candidates for bipartisan compromise on climate change. He did express hope that negotiations being led by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) could result in landmark climate legislation.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/is-kigali-the-key-to-future-climate-legislation/
