FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 1 November 2007
Contact: Josh Dorner, 202.675.2384

Significant Improvements Needed to Lieberman-Warner Bill
Sierra Club Looks to Full Committee Markup to Strengthen Bill

(Washington, D.C.)--Today a subcommittee of the Senate Environment and
Public Works Committee voted 4-3 to move the America’s Climate Security Act
(S. 2191), introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner
(R-VA), to the full committee for hearings and a markup. The committee’s
chairwoman, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), has announced plans to move the
legislation forward rapidly.

Statement of Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director

"We are pleased that today’s subcommittee markup included incremental
changes to improve the bill and we will continue to work vigorously to
strengthen this proposal as it moves forward. While we support moving the
bill into full committee, it unfortunately still falls far short of what
science requires and what economic fairness demands and thus we cannot yet
offer our support for the bill. Just as bold action is needed to address
the challenge of global warming, bold changes will need to be made to this
legislation before we are able to support it. Our support is not
contingent on perfection, but rather on whether a bill offers us a
reasonably good chance of achieving our widely shared goals: preventing
catastrophic global warming and bringing a clean energy future to life.

"It is essential that we get markets moving immediately to begin reducing
our emissions and speed our transition to the clean energy economy. This
can only be achieved by setting a strong, science-based short-term
target--a 15-20 percent reduction in total emissions by 2020. The bar must
also be set where science demands in the long-run--a reduction of 80
percent by 2050. Our window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic changes
to our climate is rapidly closing--perhaps faster than any of us previously
imagined--and this bill’s targets do not match up with the urgent challenge
that scientists have lain before us.

"Polluters must pay for the damage they do to our climate--period. This
bill continues to give hundreds of billions of dollars in allowances to
polluters for far too long and also returns a significant portion of the
proceeds from the allowances that are auctioned off right back to those
same polluting industries. Instead of private windfalls, we must have a
100 percent auction or allocation for the public benefit to give us the
funds we need in order to ensure a just transition for workers, protect
consumers from rising energy costs, and make the investments in new
technology needed to make the new clean energy economy a reality.

"Senator Boxer has provided exemplary leadership on this issue and has a
stated goal of improving the bill. We very much look forward to working
with her and other members of the committee to produce a bill that is
sufficiently strong to address the challenge before us. Barring these
significant changes, we do not believe that this bill should be enacted."

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