Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions. The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).
"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said....
"Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.
I love it when top down liberals like Barbara Boxer unmask themselves as Beltway village creatures. The global warming issue is pretty simple. There is a level of CO2 that will kill all of us. Lieberman-Warner does not keep us under that level and will probably prevent another bill from passing for many years. Barbara Boxer is pushing to pass Lieberman-Warner because she wants to just 'get something done'.
Friends of the Earth alone among environmental groups pointed this out, and Boxer has swung back hard with every right-wing argument she can, calling them defeatists and unwilling to engage in negotiations.
I'm quite fond of Barbara Boxer. Her ardent, sincere, and repeated failures to move liberal policies in the Senate - most recently the Energy Bill - suggest there was a time when liberals actually had power and could work through the policy process. Mike Lux tells me that was the case once, but it's not within my political experience.
Boxer has served as a symbol for liberals of someone who stands for the correct policies and loses on the broad thrust of public policy, a liberal who believes that Senate work should be more congenial. It's why she stumped for Joe Lieberman in 2006, and it's why she sent out the following fundraising solicitation for Senate Democrats - including Mary Landrieu - who just defeated all of us on the Energy Legislation that is her signature issue.
The email is from her PAC for a Change. And Mary Landrieu is her candidate spotlight on the PAC home page.
The results are surprising. The report concludes that the U.S. can cut its greenhouse emissions in half from projected levels in 2030 at minimal cost. None of the steps would cost more than $50 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided. Plus, 40% of the reductions would actually save money. That puts the overall cost at just a few dollars per ton of carbon dioxide-or in the tens of billions of dollars overall.
Moreover, it doesn't take any breakthroughs in technology. "Eighty percent of the reductions come from technology that exists today at the commercial scale," says Stephenson. And the remaining 20% comes from ideas already well along in development, such as hybrid cars that plug into electrical outlets and have batteries big enough to go 30 or 40 miles on electric power alone and biofuels made from cellulose (such as prairie grass) rather than foodstuffs like corn.
There was big news on the global warming legislative front today. The Lieberman-Warner bill, which is a significant piece of legislation, passed its first markup today. It lost the support of every Republican but John Warner, as well as Bernie Sanders, who doesn't think the bill is strong enough.
This is good. The bill won't pass. Barbara Boxer should know better than to put up a corporate subsidy bill and expect to get anywhere, but apparently, she doesn't.
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I'm quite fond of Barbara Boxer. Her ardent, sincere, and repeated failures to move liberal policies in the Senate - most recently the Energy Bill - suggest there was a time when liberals actually had power and could work through the policy process. Mike Lux tells me that was the case once, but it's not within my political experience.