Senate climate bill drops "cap and trade" term

Senate Democrats tried out a new catch phrase Wednesday to sell their global warming bill: pollution reduction and investment, or PRI. But it's just another name for cap and trade, a term derided by Republican critics as "cap and tax" because it will increase energy prices and which Democratic polls have shown faring poorly with voters. The rebranding is an indication of the uphill battle the climate bill — which would cap greenhouse gases and also allow industries to buy emission allowances — faces in the Senate. A number of Democratic senators, currently entangled in the heated health care debate, said they continued to have trouble with key elements of the climate legislation. Several said it would be a huge challenge — perhaps impossible — to try to get a climate bill passed this year. The idea to remake cap and trade into pollution reduction and investment came from Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., author of the bill unveiled Wednesday. He came up with it about a month ago to refocus attention on what the bill would do, not how it goes about doing it...more