10 Common Sense Principles to Guide Federal Climate Policy Development

The Roundtable has been engaged with Western policymakers, community leaders, business leaders and non-governmental organizations in a constructive dialogue to develop consensus Western recommendations and principles that should guide federal legislators.

Our suggested common sense climate principles are as follows:

1. Congress is best suited to determine how a national greenhouse gas emissions reduction program should work. Therefore, any bill should explicitly preempt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
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2. Federal action should aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also allowing for robust economic growth and job creation across all sectors. Legislation that aims to reduce emissions by forcing a further contraction of our economy -- by artificially constricting energy supply and encouraging higher prices -- will choke any economic recovery and will be soundly rejected by the American people. Therefore, cap-and-trade legislation should include some form of "safety valve" to ensure that the American people are not subjected to wild swings in energy prices or runaway cost increases.
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3. Federal action should incorporate, as part of any greenhouse gas emissions reduction program, a fully transparent cost-benefit assessment that yields a net positive outcome and achieves wide consensus. Consumers must be made fully aware of the potential economic impacts of proposed policies, prior to any vote in the Congress.
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4. Federal action should encourage the rapid research, development, demonstration and deployment, through public-private partnerships, of a broad spectrum of supply-side and demand-side technologies and practices aimed at managing greenhouse gas emissions.
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5. Federal action should allow the electric utility sector to continue to supply consumers with adequate supplies of clean, affordable and reliable energy and to recover all costs necessary to achieve any greenhouse gas emission reduction levels sought by public policies.
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6. Federal action should involve all sectors of the economy, all sources and sinks and all types of greenhouse gases.
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7. Federal action should recognize that climate change is a global phenomenon that requires comprehensive, long-term and coordinated worldwide responses. Unilateral action by the U.S. -- without comparable commitments to reductions by emitting nations like China and India -- will harm our ability to compete in world markets, export U.S. jobs overseas and will result in no measurable change in future climates.
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8. Federal action should recognize that the time frame for implementation of any greenhouse gas emission reduction requirements must be tied to technology availability, reliability and economic feasibility in order to avoid unacceptable impacts on consumers and the electricity grids.
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9. Federal action should target revenues generated by a climate change program to the rapid development and deployment of technologies to capture and store greenhouse gases, to appropriate assistance programs that help end-use consumers deal with higher energy costs, and to reasonable climate mitigation initiatives.
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10. Federal action should allow greater access to public lands (both onshore and offshore) for the development of domestic energy resources -- such as renewables, oil and gas, oil shale, coal and nuclear power -- so that America can continue to seek greater energy independence.