Letter to the Members of the Senate Urging Bipartisan Progress on Climate Legislation
November 9, 2009
Dear Senator,
I write on behalf of the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit organization that promotes energy efficiency, to urge you and your colleagues in the Senate to enact strong climate and energy legislation as quickly as feasible. Now that the Environment and Public Works Committee has completed its work on climate legislation and the Energy Committee has put forward a strong, bi-partisan clean energy bill, we ask that the remaining Committees with jurisdictional interest in the climate bill complete their policy recommendations or hold mark ups before Thanksgiving in order to give the Majority Leader the tools needed to craft a bill that can be considered by the full Senate as early as this calendar year.
In the process, we urge both parties to follow the lead of the Energy Committee and cast aside partisan acrimony to move toward agreement on vital legislation that will help to create clean energy jobs and restore American competitiveness in clean energy innovation.
America must have strong energy and climate legislation if we are to harness the power of energy efficiency to reduce global warming. Energy efficiency is one of the most effective and immediate cost containment tools for implementing a cap-and-trade system across all sectors of the U.S. economy. The energy efficiency provisions contained in both the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House in late June and in the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act reported by the Environment and Public Works Committee last week would stimulate major investments in energy efficiency, create hundreds of thousands of new clean energy jobs nationwide, reduce consumer energy costs, and help to provide the basis for sustained economic growth in the future.
The stakes are too high — for our planet and for the Americans who will benefit from the clean energy economy -- to let partisanship derail enactment of legislation to put our country clearly on a path to a sustainable and globally competitive energy future. We are encouraged by the candid conversations on climate legislation that have occurred recently under the aegis of Senators Kerry and Graham, and hope that efforts like these may ultimately produce a meaningful bill that will have widespread support in both parties.
With the Copenhagen Summit now just a month away, it is imperative that the Senate move quickly toward producing an energy and climate bill that demonstrates our national commitment to reducing carbon emissions. The world will be watching the Senate in the weeks leading up to these negotiations, and it is hard to foresee how global cooperation and consensus on climate can occur without strong leadership from the United States.
We are hopeful that you and our colleagues will put forward a roadmap for the U.S., and one that can be used as a beacon for action by the rest of the world, that will drive efficiency and clean energy technologies and practices into the global economy for the good of all. We stand ready to assist in any way we can.
Very truly yours,
Kateri Callahan
