Sep. 1--Alaskans are starting to get heated up over climate legislation pending in Congress.

Friends and foes in Anchorage this week are taking their ideas and concerns on the public circuit, with an anti-bill rally on Monday and a pro-bill roundtable discussion scheduled on Wednesday.

At Monday morning's downtown rally, Alaska business leaders and political conservatives argued that the bill will cook Alaska's goose: future oil and gas production, both onshore and offshore. The rally was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and 40 to 50 local organizations, according to local organizer Willis Lyford. The API is sponsoring roughly 20 similar rallies in cities around the country.

Nearly one-third of Alaska's workers owe their jobs to the oil industry, warned Vince Beltrami, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO, citing a recent University of Alaska Anchorage study.

"This legislation will cost jobs in the long term," Beltrami said.

The legislation is a bid to prevent significant damage from climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In Alaska, climate change has been blamed for declining sea ice, melting permafrost and costly damage to coastal communities.

If passed, the bill, titled the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would create new costs for energy producers and distributors, from refineries to coal-fired power plants, and other companies that emit greenhouse gases. Those costs would be passed along to U.S. consumers. Just how much it will cost is a major bone of contention: Many conservatives claim it will ruin the U.S. economy but Democrats say the bill's costs are relatively minor, especially when compared to the catastrophic costs of not regulating greenhouse gases.

The bill, dubbed the Waxman-Markey bill, in honor of its authors, narrowly passed the House of Representatives in June and is headed to the Senate this month.

Not all oil industry boosters are critical of the bill. Several labor unions, including Beltrami's AFL-CIO and some oil companies, including BP, Conoco Phillips and Royal Dutch Shell, have endorsed the cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions that is included in the Waxman-Markey bill.

Here's basically how cap-and-trade would work: Congress would put a cap on the total U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases and require companies and utilities to get "allowances" to emit the gases and sell petroleum-based fuel. After the government distributes a finite number of allowances, the companies and utilities would be able to buy and sell them, globally.