House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she plans to resurrect something similar to the failed cap-and-trade bill that the House passed nearly a decade ago but that the Senate couldn’t muster the votes to pass.
“We couldn’t pass in the Senate our climate bill, and we’ll be returning to that,” Pelosi said on Friday at as part of MSNBC’s “The Speaker” town hall broadcast.
Pelosi is referring to the bill named after former Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, who is now a senator. The bill put in place a cap on carbon dioxide emissions, while offering emission credits to the power plant operators, which they would have to purchase in order to meet the cap. The price of the credit would adjust as an incentive to reduce emissions.
While there has been talk of simply imposing a tax on carbon emissions as something that Republicans would gravitate toward, there has not been recent chatter about taking up Waxman-Markey.
“When I was speaker the first time, my flagship issue was climate,” Pelosi said during the event.
After she was sworn in on Thursday as the new speaker, she also discussed making climate change a core initiative over the next two years.
Some environmental groups told the Washington Examiner ahead of Pelosi’s remarks that they have been in talks with staff on Capitol Hill on bringing up a cap-and-trade bill, and that there are several lawmakers looking at new legislation.
