Climate-bill foes likely to seize on CBO's scoring

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By Amanda DeBard and Stephen Dinan

Congress' chief scorekeeper says the global warming bill moving through Congress will either be scored as a major tax increase or a massive expansion of the federal government - and either one could give opponents substantial ammunition to complicate Democrats' efforts to pass a bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a letter sent last week to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, said Democrats' approach of creating allowances for emitting greenhouse gases requires developing from scratch a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Whether the allowances are sold, as President Obama wants, and scored as a tax increase, or given away, as House Democratic leaders have suggested, and scored as "cash grants" to businesses, opponents are lining up to use CBO's conclusions as ammunition in the public relations battle over the bill.

"This is a tax increase, and what you're giving away to businesses are tax breaks," said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist involved in planning strategy for the bill. "Who's paying for all of this? It couldn't possibly be clearer - the consumers of the United States of America. Talk about feeding into a story line."

Republican leaders in Congress have argued that Democrats' approach to global warming will impose a large new cost on businesses, which will be passed on to consumers in the middle of a recession. Democrats say action is needed to avert the effects of warming and say they can mitigate some costs.

Democrats and environmentalists both said the letter is not the last word from the CBO, and Democrats said they hope to work with the agency to try to bring down the cost of the bill to the government.

The CBO letter sent Friday was obtained by The Washington Times. It marks the second time in a week that CBO has complicated the path for those who want to control greenhouse-gas emissions through a so-called "cap-and-trade" plan.

Last week, CBO issued a paper prepared for Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat, that said global warming controls cannot guarantee any outcome and said the Earth's temperature will continue to rise - possibly 0.5 degrees to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit this century - even if greenhouse-gas emissions never exceed today's levels.

Several analysts said CBO's letter to Mr. Waxman could undermine Democrats' schedule to get the bill on the House floor because it gives the Ways and Means Committee a strong argument to claim jurisdiction as well.

The six-page CBO letter also listed repeated examples of situations in which, for purposes of the federal budget, it will assume that the cap-and-trade approaches will dampen businesses' income, meaning less revenue to the federal government.