The answer, I think, is something approaching “yes,” although probably for broader reasons than Kate implies in her piece. The real issue at hand is the fundamental weakness of the House vis-à-vis the Senate. Last spring, when we were all obsessing over every detail of the climate debate in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I think we didn’t quite appreciate just how subordinate the House had become to the Senate, for the simple reason that we hadn’t yet seen the health care sausage-making play out.

Now it seems clear that if health care is to pass at all, House liberals will be forced to swallow their pride and pass a much less progressive Senate bill verbatim, even if there’s room for some smallish changes via reconciliation down the line. Likewise with climate legislation: For all the weeks and months of work that went into producing — and whipping the votes for — the Waxman-Markey bill, the liberals in the lower chamber will almost certainly have to bite the bullet and pass something resembling whatever eventually comes out of the Senate (if anything).

One has to wonder when the House will lose its desire for vigorous debate over its bills — given that they’re likely to be supplanted by their Senate counterparts — and when we in the media will stop devoting so much ink (or so many pixels) to House debates that are likely to be rendered close to meaningless. I know I, for one, feel a bit silly for having spent so much time scrutinizing every compromise that threatened to undermine the efficacy of the Waxman-Markey bill, now that they all seem just about moot.

All indications are that the bill will be slightly stronger than the House version. Kate Sheppard obtained a leaked draft (PDF) of the Senate bill that would mandate a 20-percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, as opposed to the 17-percent target set by the House. The long-term targets of the two bills — including an 83-percent emissions reduction by 2050 — are largely the same. The Senate bill will also address concerns over the cooperation of China and India, a sticking point in the debate thus far.

Today’s rollout will highlight the national security benefits of the legislation, as Kerry and Boxer will be joined by a retired Navy admiral and a U.S. Army Afghan war veteran. Kerry’s very presence as a lead sponsor of the bill marks a shift from the House debate, when the legislation was crafted and debated almost exclusively by members of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

But Kerry also emphasized the environmental and economic advantages of his bill in a column in Politico today. And he didn’t shy away from the game-changing nature of the legislation. “The Clean Jobs and American Power Act is aimed at no less than the reinvention of the way America produces and uses energy,” he wrote.

The Environment and Public Works Committee will now take up debate on the legislation, which will eventually be merged with an energy bill passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June — a bill that left many environmentalists disappointed.

Boxer and Kerry’s draft, on the other hand, is sure to please environmental advocates, with its aggressive targets and retained authority for the Environmental Protection Agency. But given the difficulty of passing progressive health care reform in the Senate — and predictions that climate legislation will be even more contentious — few believe that a bill this strong will be able to clear the Senate floor.

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to unveil a major global warming bill immediately after Congress returns from the August recess, she said today….

Boxer predicted she would have at least one Republican co-sponsor on her bill, though she would not name names.

This last piece of news is potentially huge. Democrats have started giving up hope for bipartisanship on health care — to the chagrin of Republicans — but because a number of conservative Democrats are unlikely to vote for a cap-and-trade bill, it will be necessary to bring a few Republicans on board, at least to break a filibuster. A Republican co-sponsor could give cover to moderate Republicans — and fence-sitting Democrats — to vote for cloture, even if they have concerns about the political impact of a “yes” vote in the final tally.

If there is a GOP co-sponsor, it will most likely be Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the two moderates from Maine.

An ethanol production plant in South Dakota (iStockphoto)

Before the American Clean Energy and Security Act could reach the House floor for a vote on June 26, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took to the podium and launched an improvised filibuster in protest of last-minute additions to the bill by the Democratic leadership. For over an hour, he read passages from the more than 300 pages of amendments, lambasting provision after provision on behalf of his frustrated Republican colleagues who balk at the expansion of energy regulation.

Now, as the Senate takes up debate on the legislation, the objections to some of these late changes are coming from a very different camp: environmental advocacy groups.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the most important amendments to the cap-and-trade bill, which seeks to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy sources, represents a compromise between the bill’s architects and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who threatened to block passage if concessions were not made to agricultural interests. The amendment significantly reduces the criteria that biofuels, such as ethanol and wood pellets, would have to meet in order to be considered “renewable” — a victory for farmers who grow these materials.

But a study by the National Resources Defense Council shows that these changes could reduce the emissions-cutting effects of the legislation by as much as a third, thereby undermining the bill’s central aim.

“The ACES bill is supposed to require a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020,” David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the NRDC, stated in his written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday. “Because of the biomass loophole in the House-passed bill, the real reduction achieved could be far less — as little as 11 percent.”

In an ideal world, biofuels would produce no net emissions, since when plants grow, they take carbon out of the environment, and when they are burned, they release that carbon back into the air. However, there can be indirect contributions to greenhouse gas emissions — for example, if the land on which crops for biofuels are planted would otherwise have been used for carbon-reducing trees, or for food that is then instead planted on a freshly cleared rainforest in South America.

The version of the bill passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee tried to enforce biofuel carbon-neutrality by factoring in these indirect effects on emissions and restricting the conditions under which biofuels would be considered renewable. The Peterson amendment stripped the bill of several of these provisions and prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from accounting for indirect land use issues outside the United States for the next five years. According to Peterson and his backers, indirect land use is difficult to calculate, and the EPA will need some time to properly assess its impact.

The legislation establishes a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions and requires polluters to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. However, Hawkins charges that under the House bill, power plants could reduce their need to buy carbon allowances without actually cutting back on emissions.

“If a coal power plant replaces half of its coal with biomass, it has to hold carbon allowances for only half of its pollution,” he said in his statement to the Senate. “This makes sense only on the assumption that 100 percent of the carbon dioxide released when the biomass is burned was taken up from the atmosphere during its production.”

Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the NRDC, concurred with his colleague. “In a worst-case scenario,” Greene said, “you’re going out to an old-growth forest that’s sequestered carbon over hundreds of years,” he said. “You take that, you chop that down, you burn that, and from the atmosphere perspective, it’s exactly the same as burning coal. In that case, it really doesn’t matter that you’re displacing coal. You’re adding just as much carbon to the landscape.”

The NRDC study on the effects of the lower biofuel restrictions was conducted about a month ago, but the figures were not released until Hawkins’ testimony on Tuesday before the Environment and Public Works Committee, according to Greene, who helped produce the study. Hawkins could not be reached for comment.

The 11-percent effective emissions reduction figure invoked by Hawkins represents the low end of the potential range calculated by NRDC; more likely, the number would be around 14 percent. Both figures are below the 17-percent target recommended by President Obama and prescribed by the legislation, which itself is too low for many scientists and environmental advocates.

Rolf Skar, a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace, worries that additional support for biofuels could reduce the incentives for cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar. “Putting them in the mix here just means that they’re going to substitute for windmills and other true sources of renewable energy,” he said, adding that the Peterson amendment “was clearly based on politics, and not science.”

On the other side of the debate, the farm lobby has cheered Peterson’s efforts. Farmers could derive substantial income from provisions that subsidize the production of biofuels.

“As a general proposition, we support what Mr. Peterson got in the House bill,” said Paul Schlegel, director of public policy at the American Farm Bureau. But he added that the Bureau opposes cap-and-trade legislation overall due to its costs for farmers and consumers of energy.

In a statement following the passage of the House bill, Peterson said, “This bill promotes homegrown, clean burning renewable fuels, which is one of the best things we can do for the economy and the environment.” Peterson’s office did not respond to a request for further comment.

Many environmentalists still hold out hope that the biofuels provision will be changed in the Senate.

Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club is optimistic that given the relatively liberal composition of the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Democratic membership, the committee might be able to strengthen the biofuels language in ways the House could not. “If you look at the EPW Committee compared to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, it’s a much more hospitable environment,” he said.

Still, there is already evidence that the fight to maintain the farm-friendly biofuel provisions could be bipartisan. On Wednesday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) stated his intent to keep all of Peterson’s provisions in the Senate version of the bill, and to add “more allocations and allowances” for agriculture.

“Farm interests probably have a stronger hand in the Senate,” Dorner conceded, “given that people in nearly every state have some sort of agricultural interest.”

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opened the hearing with a shot at her colleagues across the aisle. “Today, I expect you will hear fierce words of doubt and fear and worse from the other side of the aisle regarding our legislative efforts to move forward with clean energy jobs legislation,” she said. “This is consistent with a pattern of ‘No, we can’t.’”

Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) countered, “You can be sure of this: once the American public realizes what this legislation will do to their wallets, they will resoundingly reject it.”

None of the so-called swing senators on this legislation — with the possible but unlikely exception of Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) — are present at the hearing right now, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing much common ground between the two sides in this debate.

But on the plus side, in keeping with the GOP’s newfound love of inscrutable charts, Sen. Kit Bond’s (R-Mo.) staff just pulled out the hearing’s first inscrutable chart. It’s a huge blue webbed number with the title “Waxman-Markey: A Bureaucratic Nightmare.”

More updates to come.

Update (as promised): Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), reading from his opening remarks, just stumbled over the GOP’s word of choice to describe the administration’s global warming fears. “A-pa-ca… A-pa … A-pa-ca…” he attempted, emphasizing the first syllable, confusing himself in the process and reddening visibly. A chorus of senators and audience members came to his aid.  “Apocalyptic,” they said in unison.

The vote was largely along party lines, with 44 Democrats crossing the aisle to vote against it and 8 Republicans supporting passage.

The bill, officially known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), was first introduced by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) as a discussion draft on March 31, and it passed out of Waxman’s committee on May 25. In the past few days, the Democratic leadership scrambled to whip up the necessary votes for passage by the full House, and even today, the bill’s prospects remained murky, with a large number of moderate Democrats still uncommitted.

A vote was expected around 5 p.m., but Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) conducted his version of a filibuster by giving an hour-plus-long closing speech, reading excerpts from practically every page of the 309-page manager’s amendment to the bill. When Waxman objected, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who presided over the hearing, said that House tradition allowed each party’s leadership to deliver closing arguments without time constraints. “The gentleman’s had his thirty years to put this bill together,” Boehner said, addressing Waxman.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is not expected to receive a vote until after the resolution of the health care debate.

Apparently, he had to go pretty far back. From a new blog post titled “Speaker Pyrrhus,” by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member-turned-classical historian James Inhofe (R-Okla.):

[The Waxman-Markey bill] will be, in short, a Pyrrhic victory—so named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army, during the Pyrrhic War, suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans in two key battles.

So we consulted Plutarch for his historical account of King Pyrrhus and his unfortunate victories. According to Plutarch, after his victory, Pyrrhus lamented, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In the spirit of Pyrrhus, Speaker Pelosi appears to be traversing down the same path to ruin. And with mid-term elections in 2010 looming on the horizon, voting for an energy tax could provoke the same backlash that occurred in 275 BC. Again, Plutarch: “For he had lost a great part of the forces with which he came, and all his friends and generals except a few; moreover, he had no others whom he could summon from home, and he saw that his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent, while the army of the Romans, as if from a fountain gushing forth indoors, was easily and speedily filled up again, and they did not lose courage in defeat, nay, their wrath gave them all the more vigor and determination for the war.” As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If the Democrats forget the lessons of Plutarch, it appears their defeat in 2010 will be bloody indeed.

But fear not, climate change deniers and oil company executives! House Republicans have just unleashed their secret weapon, sure to defeat the dangerous legislation. It comes in the form of a scintillating best-of video, capturing Republicans’ most powerful tirades against Waxman-Markey. And just in case the arguments themselves don’t bowl you over, the heroic soundtrack will.

Here it is, courtesy of Grist: