Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
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The U.S. might not have to go to December's climate change talks in Copenhagen empty handed. Two weeks after Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) unveiled a new draft of the climate change bill, Kerry and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced their bipartisan partnership to pass climate change legislation in an op-ed for the New York Times. By working together, the two hope to appeal to their respective party's interests and help the climate change bill get 60 votes in the Senate.
Major utility corporations, like Exelon, California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and New Mexico's PNM have announced that they are leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's controversial stance toward climate change and opposition to a clean energy bill. The Chamber represents business interests, and according to a New York Times editorial, "no organization has done more to undermine [climate change] legislation."
Hopes of passing climate change legislation before the climate summit in Copenhagen are quickly dissipating, as Rachel Morris reports in Mother Jones. It seems unlikely that any major action will be taken before the December meeting. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) originally expected all six Senate committees to allocate cap-and-trade pollution permits by September 10, and later extended the deadline to September 28. But on Wednesday, Reid signaled that the legislation might be delayed until next year. Why is climate change taking the backseat? Simply, passing a health care bill and wrestling the economy back into shape have sapped lawmakers' energy for climate change.
The people who run the finance industry are extremely smart. Says so on the label. That's how they were able to convince the government to make good on their gambling debts, though if they were a little smarter, they might have remembered that the house always wins.
They've created speculative bubbles in recent decades (and more than one had to be bailed out) over commodities like silver, unsecured loans, real estate, dotcom firms whose business plans hinged on sock puppet sales, real estate ... well, you get the picture. On to the next big thing.
That thing might well be carbon markets. Turns out, the companies that hold most of the current derivative risk will be able to make ridiculous, unsupervised bets sell dizzyingly complex derivatives against carbon offsets, too. Though no worries, the price of failure would only be the absence of a price signal that will push atmospheric carbon levels down, hastening catastrophic global climate disruption. No big:
... Well, Waxman-Markey had some good language regulating carbon and other energy derivatives.
... However, in the 300 pages of amendments added to Waxman-Markey just after 3.a.m on the night the bill passed, a few new sentences materialized that placed a big asterisk on those safeguards. The final text now says that the sections of the bill regulating carbon derivatives will be overridden by any derivatives legislation that the House passes later in the year. ...
Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, announced this week that her committee won't mark up energy and climate legislation until after the August recess. That's a good thing. It means progressive groups and activists have more time to coordinate their efforts to support the emergence of a progressive bloc of senators on these issues.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of June. The ACES bill seeks to mitigate climate change via emission reductions, investments in energy technology, creation of clean energy jobs, and rigid standards for energy efficiency. Check out Grist for a valuable breakdown of the act.
"We've just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we've ever had. They're saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it's going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that's a good thing since they'll be able to grow more corn."
He said this in spite of the fact that the projected warming would be disastrous for corn pollination, and hence, yield. Worse, he says so in spite of the fact that global warming is going to engender a lot of local flooding in many of the world's farming regions.
Scratch that. Global warming is, right now, already increasing flooding in many areas, as it is projected to do in Peterson's Minnesota, as well as the districts and states of many other staunch opponents of getting this country on the path to carbon neutrality. A taste ...
This may be one of the most important things anyone's said yet about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, or ACES. Ken Ward Jr. writing at The Charleston Gazette shares a quote from the communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, Phil Smith:
As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.
I've been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.
It doesn't seem unreasonable, as many have pointed out, that industry's weeping and wailing about this bill in public hides the fact that they know it's the best deal they're going to get.
Indeed, the EPA is one of the few government agencies that's done anything constructive to push us away from the destructive, outmoded coal industry. As the indispensible David Sasson reports, they did so just yesterday:
In a previous post, I wrote about how the coal industry got its way with ACES, the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Much of their victory had to do with sharply limiting the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose chartered purpose is to protect the environment, and therefore, public health.
The agribusiness industry won a similar victory. When Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the House Agriculture Committee and point person for an alliance of rural and coal state Democrats seeking to weaken the bill, put his foot down and said, "I'm pretty sure that any role for EPA in agriculture is a deal breaker."
Rep. Peterson's main complaint about the first draft of ACES, and what seemed to be the general complaint of the House Agriculture Committee, was that the legislation didn't give farmers enough money for things they were already doing. Throw more money at us based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, he said, or no deal.
House leadership took Peterson at his word. Like, for example, this word:
... A good number of people have told me in the past few days that major environmental organization[s are] actively working against strengthening amendments to the bill, stating that those groups are fearful that any actual strengthening will keep the bill from being passed. ...
I've certainly been hearing the same things, including that if the bill fails, progressives (both elected representatives and non-profits) will personally get blamed for any mouthing off they do now. (Don't get me started on the fabulists who're saying that it'll be easier once the Senate gets hold of this.)
... Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who has made known that he has enough votes to derail the Speaker's priority legislation if agricultural provisions aren't changed, said he spoke with Pelosi "for a while" and that it was "cordial."
"She's not putting any pressure on me," Peterson said. "She knows where I'm coming from." ...
Building a new foundation requires a lot of heavy machinery. Bulldozers to clear the land, extractors to dig the foundation, concrete-mixers to pour the cement and trucks to haul the raw materials. So perhaps it's appropriate that Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar will be at the White House tomorrow for the first meeting of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB). The group includes some of America’s leading thinkers, business executives, and academics, including the CEOs of GE, UBS, and Google. (full list here)
The Board was created by President Obama in February to provide an outside-the-Beltway perspective on how we can recover from the financial crisis and build a new foundation for the American economy. "New Foundation" is emerging as the catch-all phrase to describe Obama's domestic policy agenda, similar to FDR's "New Deal" or Johnson's "Great Society" as a recent New York Times article points out. It's a good term, capturing both the shaky and unsustainable foundation of our past economic growth and framing out the kind of economy we need to build for the long-term. We are well past the time for patchwork solutions. We must rebuild and we must rebuild the right way.
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and trucks to haul the raw materials. So perhaps it's appropriate that