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Senator John Kerry, on the Senate's environment and public works committee, is a co-sponsor of the climate legislation.
While Mr. Chu and other high-ranking administration officials were appearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, President Obama appeared at a solar-energy center in Arcadia, Fla., offering billions of federal dollars for investments in cleaner electricity and calling for “nothing less than the sustained effort of an entire nation” to achieve a new energy system.
At the same time, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in his home state of Delaware to promote the transformation of an old General Motors plant in Wilmington into a factory that will turn out plug-in hybrid cars.
But while the bill’s supporters were extolling the virtues of the energy legislation as a commonsense package that would make virtually everyone a winner in the long run, skeptics on the committee were starting to pick apart the 900-plus page proposal as too expensive, too cumbersome, ill-considered and perhaps even unnecessary.
The schism was apparent from the start of three days of hearings on Tuesday before the environment and public works panel, headed by Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California who is sponsoring the measure with her Democratic colleague, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
“Our bill is straightforward,” Ms. Boxer said. In addition, she said, it would not cost Americans nearly as much as its critics say — a mere 22 to 30 cents a day per family, according to analyses by the Environmental Protection Agency.
For just pennies a day, Ms. Boxer said, Americans of today and tomorrow can have “home-grown American energy rather than foreign oil from countries who don’t like us,” breathe cleaner air and reap the economic benefits of new sources of power.
But the environment panel’s senior Republican, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has long been skeptical about the dangers of global warming, had a different view, as did several other lawmakers.
“The bill is no doubt ambitious, but it’s also extremely costly,” he said at the outset, adding that he doubted Senator Boxer’s 30-cents-a-day vision. Mr. Inhofe, who has promised to bring a “truth squad” to an international climate conference in Copenhagen in December, said the bill in its present form ”will mean more economic pain and suffering and fewer jobs.”
The bill working its way through the Senate is similar to a climate-and-energy bill approved by the House in June. Both versions aim to cut air pollution and global warming by creating a limited marketplace for emission permits and encouraging business and industry, through subsidies and financing for research, to switch from the use of carbon fuels to wind-and-solar power and other clean technologies.
Scientists agree that “we have a narrow window of time in which to avert the ravages of global warming,” Ms. Boxer said.
“The time to act is now,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told Ms. Boxer’s panel. Also appearing before the committee were Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson.
But several senators signaled serious doubts about the legislation. Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, joined Republicans in criticizing the bill, as it became clear that regional differences can be as important as party labels on environment-and-energy issues.
“Montana, with our resource-based agriculture and tourism economies, cannot afford the unmitigated impacts of climate change,” Mr. Baucus said. “But we also cannot afford the unmitigated effects of climate-change legislation.”
He called for “common sense climate legislation that reduces greenhouse gas emissions while protecting our economy.”
Another Westerner was more blunt. “This energy tax bill will be an American job killer,” said Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming. “It’s the next attempt by the administration to promise jobs for all, create some for a few, and let the rest of us fend for ourselves.”
But a senator from the far West disagreed. “This bill can be reduced to a series of fairly clear choices,” said Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon. “It is a choice between clean air or dirty air; it is a choice between investing a billion dollars a day in red, white and blue American-made energy or sending that billion dollars a day overseas to countries like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and other countries that don’t always share our national interests.”
Perhaps inevitably, the voluminous bill has inspired some words that are less than riveting. “A key mechanism by which D.O.T. can have an impact on climate change is through our role in financing infrastructure and promoting effective transportation planning across the United States, including highways, airports, transit systems, and multi-modal facilities,” Mr. LaHood said at one point.
And Mr. Chu cited spending on green energy programs of $80 billion in the continuing economic stimulus package, including $3.4 billion being announced on Tuesday by President Obama for initial investment in a more flexible and robust power transmission grid meant to support the development of solar, wind and other alternative sources of electricity.
But he said that the kind of spending that is needed to make green energy a reality will only be sparked if Congress passes legislation to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants blamed for global climate change, along with a system of trading allowances to spur investment in the cheapest available technologies to conserve energy, produce it from renewable resources, and trap the carbon emissions from burning coal.
That kind of transformation was also the theme in Wilmington, where Vice President Biden, Delaware state officials and Fisker Automotive, whose headquarters are in Irvine, Calif., announced that the company had chosen an old auto plant as its site for making a new variety of plug-in hybrid cars.
The Department of Energy has lent the company more than $500 million to retool the plant, which was built by General Motors in 1947. It was closed this summer when G.M. announced that the company was discontinuing the Saturn and Pontiac models as part of its bankruptcy restructuring.
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- WASHINGTON — The White House and its allies in the Senate intensified their campaign Tuesday, in the face of some determined opposition, to advance a bill that its supporters say will reduce global warming while making the United States more secure.“When the starting gun sounded on the clean energy race, the United States stumbled,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Capitol Hill. “But I remain confident that we can make up the ground. When we gear up our research and production of clean energy technologies, we can still surpass any other country.”
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