WASHINGTON
-- Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee helped hand President Bush a rare domestic
setback yesterday, joining Democrats to kill a measure to give power
plants and other industrial facilities later deadlines to cut their
emissions of air pollutants.
"The
existing Clean Air Act will protect our environment better than Mr.
Bush's measure, known as 'Clear Skies,' " Chafee said as he joined in a
9-to-9 vote that blocked passage of the bill by the Senate Environment
and Public Works Committee.
Independent
Sen. James Jeffords, of Vermont, and all the committee's Democrats
joined in opposition to the bill with Chafee, the lone Republican foe
of the Clear Skies measure.
The
committee chairman, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said environmentalists
who wanted further carbon-dioxide emission reductions had killed a bill
that could have provided fixed reductions in pollutants over the coming
decades. Industry has criticized the current regulatory system as
ambiguous and subject to change.
"This
bill has been killed by the environmental extremists who care more
about continuing the litigation-friendly status quo and making a
political statement on CO2 than they do about reducing air pollution,"
Inhofe said.
Supporters
held out some hope that a Clear Skies compromise could be salvaged.
There remain procedures under which the GOP could bring a version of
the bill to the full Senate, but Chafee expressed doubt that any
compromise would be struck.
"I don't share their optimism," he said.
The
bill's provisions to restrict antipollution lawsuits by states were
among the environmental community's major objections to the Clear Skies
initiative. Opponents argued that the ability to challenge polluters in
court was an important tool in the antipollution arsenal of the Clean
Air Act.
Environmentalists
hailed the vote as a "rebuke" to Mr. Bush's environmental policy, in
the words of Matt Auten of the Rhode Island Public Interest Research
Group, which lobbied Chafee to help defeat the measure. Some
environmentalists decried the bill as a sweetheart deal for industries
that have contributed heavily to the campaigns of Mr. Bush and other
Republican candidates.
But
a coalition of unions and manufacturing interests said that the demise
of the bill would help raise energy prices without curbing the
emissions from Midwestern utilities that pollute the air in downwind
states, including all of New England.
Chafee's
vote was "a very important and commendable stand in working to defeat a
Clear Skies bill, which would have been a disaster for public health
and for clean air," Auten said.
Auten
and other environmentalists had criticized Chafee for joining in
negotiations with Republicans toward a compromise on a bill that some
environmentalists deemed so objectionable that it should simply be
killed.
Chafee
defended his willingness to discuss possible improvements with
committee Republicans. "I never would have done anything to harm the
environment in Rhode Island," he said.
Chafee
opposed the bill on broad grounds. First, he said it would represent a
step backward from the antipollution standards established by the 1990
amendments to the 1970s-vintage Clean Air Act. (His father, the late
Sen. John H. Chafee, had played a prominent role in enacting those
amendments.)
Second,
Chafee lamented what he viewed as the bill's failure to address global
warming. "It's a shame that the U.S. Congress is the last bastion of
denial on climate change," Chafee said.
Chafee joined several Democrats in negotiations with Inhofe partly out of a desire to add provisions to fight global warming.
Sen.
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said that the Bush administration's labeling
its bill "Clear Skies" was "akin to calling Frankenstein Tom Cruise."
Yesterday's
vote followed two dozen hearings over the past two years and, more
recently, weeks of intense lobbying on both sides, including the
appearance of environmentalists at Chafee's Providence office, calling
on him to vote against the bill.
Mr.
Bush's plan would have amended the law to reduce nitrogen oxides,
sulfur dioxide and mercury in the air by letting plants trade pollution
rights among themselves so long as the industry attained overall limits
set by the government.
