The Climate Bill passes the house on a narrow margin

I spent most of Thursday night and all of Friday trying to get people to take action on this legislation. I sent out about 200 twitter updates on which house member’s position was leaning, urging the twitter universe to call fax or email their member of the house.

Well as you most likely know the bill passed by razor thin vote of 219 yes to 212 no

Bucks County’s Representative Murphy voted in favor of the bill, we need to send him thank you notes for voting this way. But I am disappointed in Representative Jim Gerlach, he voted no even though he is supposedly relatively pro-environment. After his vote on this I don’t think I can support him in any way, this bill was way too important!

The league of conservation voters stated that they made the decision not to endorse any representative who votes no on this legislation. I hope the Sierra Club takes the same route.

One thing I did find interesting was that I was searching all the PA House Representatives web pages for clues on how they would vote on this bill. Representative Bud Shuster had a pole on his page. It was do you support cap and trade. At the time I logged on there were only 5 votes yes, so I voted and it updated and tallied my vote so the count went up to 6. About 4 hours later I re-checked his site again and the vote count was back at 5. I thought it was just my browser and refreshed but low and behold it was still 5. I wanted to see if this poll was rigged or not so I went to other computers at work and voted 4 more times one on a different computer. Each time it registered another vote (from 5 to 6) and then went back to my main computer refreshed and low and behold it stayed at 5, and it was still 5 after 2 hours later. Was it a bug? Or was the survey rigged? I don’t know.

So how did the Pennsylvania delegation vote on the passage of the American Clean Energy & Security Act? (ACES)

Yes Votes	Party		No Votes	Party
Robert Brady	D		Jim Gerlach	R
Mike Doyle	D		Joseph R. Pitts	R
Chaka Fattah	D		Todd Russell Platts	R
Paul Kanjorski	D		Thompson	R
Tim Murphy	D		Jason Altmire	D
John Murtha	D		Christopher P. Carney	D
Allyson Y. Schwartz	D		Kathy Dahlkemper	R
Joe Sestak	D		Charlie Dent	R
			Tim Holden	D
			B. Shuster	R
			Jim Gerlach	R
			Joseph R. Pitts	R
			Todd Russell Platts	R

The work is not over, the bill still has serious flaws which need to be improved and it still has to go through the Senate. The Senate’s version is much weaker than the houses and currently it looks like there are not enough votes to get this legislation passed.

An analysis reveals that in the 2 weeks leading up to the vote, coal and oil lobbyists outspent environmental groups 16:1, resulting in a bill that may dissuade international support at the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. Also knowing full well that nary a single republican would be voting for ACES, Democratic Rep. Peterson used his clout to give full power to the Dept. of Agriculture in allocating its own carbon offsets. This means the EPA will have no jurisdiction over agricultural permits, even if they have environmental impacts.

We should enjoy this victory for now but we need to keep vigilant and work to improve this landmark bill.