The House decides: the House of Representatives voted in favour of a wide-ranging energy bill in a vote held yesterday morning
House strips Big Oil of $16bn tax break
The US House of Representatives has passed a Democratic rewrite of US energy policy that strips $16 billion in tax incentives away from Big Oil, channelling it instead toward renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
The 786-page bill, passed in a rare Saturday vote, was a top priority for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and is an amalgam of bills assembled by about a dozen of the chamber's committees in recent months.
Republicans called it a "no-energy bill" because it lacks new drilling incentives, and they derided the new emphasis on renewables as "green pork", a Reuters report said.
The White House threatened to veto the bill on concerns that it could boost energy prices.
House Republican leader John Boehner said the bill "cuts the lifeblood of our economy off at the knees by increasing taxes to pay for green pork projects," referring to billions of dollars of "energy conservation bonds" that would finance renewable projects.
The bill, the New Direction for Energy Independence, National Security, & Consumer Protection Act and the related tax title would spur a massive redistribution of federal incentives to wind, solar, geothermal and away from producing energy from oil, natural gas and coal.
"It's an historic turn away from a fossil fuel agenda and toward a renewable energy agenda for America," Reuters quoted Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, as saying. "It has been a long time coming."
The bill sets new standards for appliances and building efficiency codes, and spurs possible renegotiation of faulty Gulf of Mexico drilling leases signed by the Clinton administration that left about $2 billion on the table.
The House voted 220-190 to add a controversial amendment that would require US utilities to generate 15% of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2020, the news agency said.
Republicans and oil-state Democrats criticised provisions in the tax portion of the House bill that would repeal reduced tax rates for major integrated oil companies, and drop foreign income tax deductions for companies that produce oil and natural gas overseas.
Those two measures alone would impose about about $16 billion in new industry taxes from 2007-2017 on big US players like Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, according to Congressional Budget Office data cited by Reuters.