E2 Round-up: Fuel taxes face tough road as climate option, a fight over UK climate ads, and OPEC keeps oil output unchanged

The alternative climate change plan emerging in the Senate will create new barriers to passage even as it knocks down others, reports CNNmoney.com.

Steve Hargreaves, in a broad overview piece, notes the perils of using a tax or fee to address greenhouse gas emissions from motor fuels, rather than putting them under a cap-and-trade system.

Oil companies had bitterly opposed a House-approved cap-and-trade plan that required refiners to secure emissions allowances for their fuels’ use in transportation.

But while oil companies have appeared kinder to the alternative plan that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and two colleagues are crafting, securing industry buy-in is far, far from a slam-dunk.

From the CNN piece: “It is unlikely that the oil industry will eventually support whatever shape it takes in the bill,” Divya Reddy, an energy policy analyst at the political consultancy Eurasia Group, wrote in a recent research note. “Moreover, carbon fees will translate into higher prices at the pump, an outcome with which few politicians will want to be associated.”

The story also looks at a range of other proposals and trade-offs in play.

Over in the UK, the Guardian checks in on a government ad campaign on climate change that has “become a lightning rod for the politically charged debate over the issue.” 

The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency – an independent regulator that enforces advertising codes – ruled that two print ads went too far and banned them.

“As expected, the ASA ruling said that the language used to indicate how storms, flooding and heatwaves will increase ‘should have been phrased more tentatively.’ However, it added that the images of the UK flooding and of a drought ‘were not in themselves ... exaggerated or misleading,’” the Guardian piece notes.

The BBC News reports on the issue here, noting that several other ads, including a TV commercial, were cleared. Both the accounts note that British officials are defending the campaign.

Climate change secretary Ed Miliband acknowledged that some of the phrasing in the disputed ads could have been better, but defended the overall thrust of the campaign to build climate change awareness.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg checks in on clean energy investing in the absence of a new international climate change agreement.

And the Wall Street Journal looks at OPEC’s decision to leave output unchanged.