Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Voinovich: Energy-Only Bill Still The Way To Go

By Amy Harder  

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio

Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio was one of only a couple Republicans to join almost a dozen moderate Democrats in a closed-door meeting Tuesday to discuss the climate and energy proposal being crafted by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn. In an interview with reporters afterward, Voinovich said he was open to learning more about the limited cap-and-trade system the proposal will likely include. Still, he said, the best bipartisan path forward would be with an energy-only bill.

Edited excerpts follow.

Q: How do you think the meeting went?

Voinovich: There were some interesting things that were discussed in there. Just like everything else here in the United States Senate, the devil's in the details. I'm more than happy to follow up on some of the suggestions that I heard today, and there's more meat that's got to be put on the bones. I'd like to hear more about some of the proposals and I'm not going to go into them.

I did make it clear to John and to Lindsey that I think the environment for a large cap-and-trade, or whatever you want to call it, is not there today.... It's not up in the polls like it used to be. Copenhagen didn't help the situation. Most people know that without some international trade, you can't deal with the carbon leakage problem.

I felt that the best way that you could possibly get this done on a bipartisan basis would be to take the energy bill and put on a nuclear title, put on a coal title, put on an energy efficiency title, and see if we could get some people to support it. The whole big picture about the allowances and trading and the rest of that, right now, it kind of boggles my mind. I want to see how this all works out. This idea that we're going to collect these allowances and then we're going turn them back to the people is something that -- I've been in this business 44 years. People are very skeptical about saying, "What we're going to do is take a dollar out of your back pocket and then we'll turn it around and put it in your right one."

Q: What do you think about the sector-by-sector approach they're discussing for a cap-and-trade system?

Voinovich: That kind of cap I think was mentioned. But I'd like to know what the details are.... Dealing with manufacturing today in this country and where it's at, the issue of how do you deal with the oil industry and some of the issues that they have, dealing with agriculture, there's a whole bunch of groups that are out there that -- how far do they get brought into the net? My feeling is the smaller the net, the better chance you have of getting something done. But if it looks like the big thing that we got out of the house, the Kerry-Boxer bill here, I think it would be dead on arrival.

The point is this: I'm willing to look at getting the details, come back and, like I am, I'll try to be as objective as I can, and I'll see whether it works or doesn't work.

Q: Are you going to be an active participant?

Voinovich: I'm going to be an active participant at least reacting to what some of these things are after I get the details. There's just a whole bunch of question marks out there.

Q: Do you think this approach is more politically feasible than an economy-wide cap-and-trade system?

Voinovich: Let's say that I'm going to listen. I want more details.

Q: What's your take on putting a carbon tax on the transportation sector? That's one of the points of Kerry, Graham and Lieberman's draft proposal.

Voinovich: The question then is, how do they pay it? You've got two problems. You have the refineries, and they emit. Under the other bills, they were going to hold the oil industry responsible for all the customers out there. There was some talk about shifting the cost onto the people who buy gasoline in order to pay for, basically, the allowances that they'd have to buy for the industry. I don't have enough details on that.

If you take the new CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standards... you're going to have enormous reductions in greenhouse gases just because of the CAFE standards. So the question is, how far do you have to go above what we already are doing? It's very interesting right now. A lot of the companies are shutting down coal-fired plants and they're going to other ways of doing things. There's some thought about encouraging natural gas, but in the process of encouraging natural gas, you're going to build more gas-fired plants, which emit about what half of what coal does but you're going to then be stuck with them until they're 40 years old.

Q: Are you discouraged more Republicans weren't in the meeting?

Voinovich: [Pause] No, I'm not discouraged.