As the debate over a global warming bill began in the Senate Monday, two disparate visions of the future were offered by each political party’s ranking member on the Environment & Public Works Committee.

Depending on the outcome, history might look upon this Lieberman-Warner debate as the Boxer-Inhofe face-off. One feels that a near-recession is the perfect time to enact legislation that will drastically raise energy prices; the other sees the bill as a regressive tax that would end up doing the most financial damage to low-income Americans.

In her opening remarks Monday, Committee chairperson Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said to her Senate colleagues, “Why do [Lieberman-Warner] now? We’re in a recession. Precisely because we’re in a recession is why we should be doing this. This bill is the first thing that brings us hope.”

Various analyses show that Lieberman-Warner would result in higher prices at the gas pump, between 41 cents and $1 per gallon by 2030. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says Lieberman-Warner would effectively raise taxes on Americans by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The federal Energy Information Administration says the bill would result in a 9.5% drop in manufacturing output and higher energy costs.

Carbon caps will have an especially harmful impact on low-income Americans and those with fixed incomes. A recent CBO report found: “Most of the cost of meeting a cap on CO2 emissions would be borne by consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households.”

The poor already face energy costs as a much higher percentage of their income than wealthier Americans. While most Americans spend about 4% of their monthly budget on heating their homes or other energy needs, the poorest fifth of Americans spend 19%. A 2006 survey of Colorado homeless families with children found that high energy bills were cited as one of the two main reasons they became homeless.

This view was bolstered by President Bush, who told to the UK’s Guardian on Monday:

You know, there’s a much better way to address the environment than imposing these costs on the job creators, which will ultimately have to be borne by American consumers. . . . I urge the Congress to be very careful about running up enormous costs for future generations of Americans.

Isn’t it fascinating that Boxer expressed similar concerns about posterity at her news conference Monday, as reported by the Associated Press? “It’s about our children, about their children, and about the planet we’ve inherited.”

Yes, Senator, but this bill could make it difficult for some Americans to feed their children, a concern curiously shared by the Cleveland Plain Dealer in an editorial published Sunday: “The bill, as conceived, will just bore new holes into an already battered economy.”

In fact, even the New York Times recognized the financial problems inherent in this bill, as evidenced by the first paragraph of John M. Broder’s piece published Tuesday:

The Senate on Monday opened a raucous debate over climate change legislation even though it will put supporters of the bill, including all three presidential candidates, on the spot — essentially forcing them to come out in favor of high energy costs at a time when American consumers are paying record fuel prices.