Obama’s Call for Cap-and-Trade a Concern for ATA Chairman
This story appears in the March 2 print edition of Transport Topics.
President Obama called on Congress to approve legislation creating a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Obama spoke on Feb. 24 to Congress in a joint session and invited spectators, who included the chairman of American Trucking Associations.
In his address, Obama asked the House and Senate to “send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.”
Such legislation, favored by environmental groups, would set limits and allowances for the amount of carbon various industries could emit. It likely would require businesses failing to meet their goal to purchase credits while also allowing companies that outperform goals to accumulate credits for sale or future use.
Charles “Shorty” Whittington, ATA’s chairman and president of Grammer Industries, attended the address. He said the call for a cap-and-trade system stood out.
“That’s something that ATA is certainly going to be concerned about, and hopefully we can keep that to nonmobile sources,” he told Transport Topics the day after the speech. “But if it doesn’t, it’s going to have a huge impact [on trucking], and that’s something that we certainly have to be aware of.”
To meet climate-change goals, Obama said his upcoming budget proposal would invest “$15 billion a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power, advanced biofuels, clean coal and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America.”
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a vocal supporter of climate change legislation, said Obama “has it exactly right” and pledged to “answer his call.”
Boxer’s Republican counterpart on the committee, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), panned the proposal, calling it “the largest annual tax increase in the history of America.”
“The range of the tax increase that would be brought on by this cap-and-trade legislation is somewhere between $300 billion and $330 billion per year,” he said.
Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Obama’s remarks “represents a new era in America’s approach to energy that will break our reliance on dirty fossil fuels and push us to develop new technologies.”
Whittington said that while he was struck by the climate change discussion, the overall experience of attending the address was extraordinary.
“What an experience,” he said. “It was a priceless event as far as I’m concerned.”
