Sources: CP staff; Portland Cement Association, Skokie, Ill.

Critics of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which passed the U.S. House and foreshadows steep future taxes ($10-37/ton, 2020-2050) on portland cement and other products of energy-intensive processing, guarantee a rough ride for the legislation in the Senate later this year. Authors Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) outline an emissions-trading program--dubbed cap and trade--geared to sharply reduce the volume of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases generated in fossil fuel combustion. It would force cement, steel and energy producers to purchase credits allowing greenhouse gas emissions. Federal bureaucrats would gradually shrink the country’s total emissions pool toward Waxman-Markey’s key benchmarks, set against net U.S. emissions in 2005: 17 percent reduction by 2020, 83 percent by 2050.

In a terse June 26 statement following the 219-212 vote, House Minority Leader John Boehner (D-OH) noted, “Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s national energy tax is a bureaucratic nightmare that will cost families more than ever for electricity, gasoline, food, and other products, and cost millions of American workers their jobs. This is a tax on anyone who drives a car, buys an American-made product, or flips on a light switch.  It will send millions of jobs overseas to countries like China and India, and place an especially heavy burden on rural America.”

“House Democratic leaders managed to squeeze the 1,510-page energy-rationing bill through the House…by filling it full of payoffs to special interests,” noted Myron Ebell, director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. “Once people find out what's in it, the bill will become an embarrassment to everyone who voted for it. Waxman-Markey has no future in the Senate, and with any luck this first victory for energy-rationing legislation will be the last. I congratulate Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) for their magnificent leadership against the bill.”