The Senate will take up the Waxman-Markey bill sometime in fall, probably in conjunction with Senator Jeff Bingaman’s (D-NM) less ambitious American Clean Energy Leadership Act, a mixed bag of something for everyone, including fossil fuel and nuclear energy proponents, which passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on June 17.
However, if you’re looking for climate change legislation that boldly whips the nation forward by aggressively curbing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, don’t look here.
Members of the House took a buzz saw to hard-hitting provisions of H.R. 2454 such as the auctioning of pollution permits within the cap-and-trade system, converting an overwhelming majority of them to freebies until well past 2020. Think of the permits no longer as tools to change environmentally destructive behavior and more as candy being tossed from a holiday parade float. Further, almost as an apology for any inconvenience caused, the bill’s short-term target for emissions reductions now calls for a de minimis 17 percent reduction in GHG emissions from 2005 levels by 2020.
Hollowing out of climate change ambitions has only begun. U.S. Senators, already more conservative than their House counterparts and now given fits of anxiety thanks to today’s fiery health care reform debate, will make the House buzz saw look like a nail file. There are only two possible fates awaiting the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate, one more ugly than the other.
Scenario #1: It’s 1993 All Over Again
Who remembers what happened with the climate change issue in 1993? Then, as now, we had a visionary young Democratic President determined to change America’s misguided course on energy and climate change. Members of Congress were debating the merits of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, a non-binding pledge to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that was signed by 154 nations during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. (The U.S. signed and ratified the accord that year under the first President Bush.) Warnings of potential climate change impacts from the newly prominent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and from Vice President Al Gore’s 1992 best-seller, Earth in the Balance, helped prod this new debate.
Most notably, President Clinton in his proposed five-year budget plan included a tax on the heat content of fuels as measured in British thermal units. The significance of the Btu proposal was its landmark attempt to apply sound economic principles while achieving pollution reduction. Polluters would be forced to internalize the costs of what heretofore had been an externality – pollution from fuel combustion. The Btu tax was to have applied to coal, crude oil, natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear power.
Republicans were hyperbolic and united in their opposition, fossil fuel-based industries were vehement and unstinting in their warnings of economic doom, and nervous centrist Democrats were unresolved in their misgivings. After urgent White House lobbying, the U.S. House of Representatives on May 19, 1993 barely passed Clinton’s Btu tax proposal, 219-213. Does any of this sound familiar?
The Btu tax then limped over to the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans alike dismissed it as a non-starter before getting down to the business of obliterating it and shoving the carcass into a corner. Its proposed costs were shifted to individual consumers and then ceaselessly whittled away until what was left were faint traces of taxes on gasoline and aviation fuel and a more enthusiastic tax on, jeepers!, personal motorboat fuel. My summer job as an environmental policy analyst for the Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute gave me a front row seat to the ever-disappearing Clinton Administration proposal. My last two of several legislative impacts analyses were regarding the nil impact on consumer driving behavior of first a proposed 6.5 cents-per-gallon gasoline tax and then a proposed 3.4-cent tax.
Now we're back to the future. Although the truth-challenged Global Climate Coalition – a highly potent and influential lobbying organization during the 1990s that denied the reality of climate change on behalf of the oil and coal industries – is mercifully dissolved, many of the organizations that once led it are lobbying as loudly, expensively and effectively today against the Waxman-Markey bill as they did 16 years ago against the Btu tax. These enormously powerful stakeholders include the coal industry, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the utilities that mostly rely on coal. They’ve already succeeded at killing most of the forced purchases of pollution permits, one of the few incentives for industry to reduce fossil fuel use.
Conservative Republicans in Congress remain as bellicose, as impervious to scientific data, and as virulently opposed to addressing the hard facts about climate change as they were in 1993. In dishonest but compelling terms, Republicans are excoriating the Waxman-Markey bill as “the biggest” job-killer and tax increase “in U.S. history.” That is, when they’re not busy still amazingly asserting publicly that climate change is a hoax.
At the same time, according to Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher as reported by David Craig in the university’s Fall 2008 magazine, there are 52 senators from coal-mining states and they “…overwhelmingly vote against bills that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”
How will the U.S. public weigh in? Somebody get Stanley Greenberg to the rescue. Americans are divided along partisan lines about global warming. Further, the Pew Research Center in April 2008 found that fewer than half of Americans believed that pollution is warming up the planet. And while a survey in March of this year found that 59% of the public favored “setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions and making companies pay for their emissions, even if that may mean higher energy prices,” surveys are notorious for respondents’ willingness to tax themselves in theory and for the yawning disconnect between responses now and action later. Large segments of this same public are reeling from the housing and financial collapse and ongoing recession. So a conflicted and distracted general public will not exert much influence on the U.S. Senate.
Who will? Residents across the 26-plus coal- or oil-producing states, plus states where coal is utilities’ dominant fuel. Residents were whipped into opposition in 1993 and they’re rallying again in 2009. Then we have this year’s media darlings – angry, right-wing conservatives, Pat Buchanan’s peasants with pitchforks come to life. They’ll soon pivot from yelling ignorantly against health care reform to yelling ignorantly against addressing climate change. The politically weak and somewhat divided environmental ngo community, despite its millions of members, doesn’t seem to be much of a counterweight.
Think of the resounding political pratfall of 1993 – Hillary’s health care debacle. What is it about improving health care and fighting climate change? Renewing their shared moribund history?
It’s déjà vu all over again. The U.S. Senate will kill President Obama’s signature attempt to pass a new law to finally begin reducing U.S. GHG emissions.
Scenario #2: Victory Trumps Substance
Democrats in the Senate, for all their shrinking resolve, don’t wish to hand the obstructionist Republicans a major victory, nor do they wish to embarrass their party’s president on one of his highest priorities. Further, while the similarities are striking, there are enough significant differences with the dynamics of 1993 to provide the Obama Administration with the muscle and margin needed to steer a climate bill past a grudging U.S. Senate.
Five key differences from 1993: First, the scientific data on climate impacts not only is more certain and more dire, in some cases it’s already here right before our eyes. Examples, unprecedented in recorded human history, include the melting of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, melting of Arctic summer ice that is much faster than anticipated, and the melting of the glaciers astride the European Alps. In the U.S. Senate, such disturbing facts don’t bother the right-wingers in denial, but they do have weight with sober-minded moderate Democrats, which in 1993 was the cohort that sealed Clinton's demise on his Btu tax.
Second, the threat that global climate change poses to U.S. national security is being seriously considered by policy makers for the first time. A recent official Pentagon report cited potentially significant national security risks caused by possible droughts, flooding, and water shortages, which could lead to mass migrations of refugees, outbreaks of illness, and competition for scarce freshwater resources. This provides one more reason for an undecided Democratic Senator or two to throw their support to Obama on this issue.
Third, corporations universally opposed the Btu tax. Today, they are mostly split on the Waxman-Markey bill. As reported in the New York Times, companies that have gone on the record supporting the legislation include General Electric, Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, DuPont, and PG&E. While the political calculations behind such support are usually more subtle than what appears before the naked eye, it is still true that pragmatic and clear-minded business leaders have come to understand the dire risks, including to their profits, posed by global climate change. In addition, business entrepreneurs and many business associations understand that embracing innovation in cleaner fuels, energy efficiency, and green technologies will kindle, not kill, profits and jobs. In the Bay Area alone, such corporate organizations or initiatives include Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network's "Climate Prosperity," the Bay Area Council, New Voice of Business, and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Fourth, the media no longer serves as enablers to climate skeptics as it did in the 1990s, when almost no reporters understood the issue or in particular the science. Focused on journalistic balance in which all supposedly legitimate points of view are equally represented, reporters a decade ago continually gave as much weight in their reportage to the mostly baseless claims of climate skeptics, including fossil fuel industry shills, as they did to the IPCC, the intergovernmental body of scientists formed by the United Nations and 2007 Co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
And fifth, this time we have an administration whose leaders seem truly united and committed on the issue. That wasn’t the case in 1993. Then, Energy Secretary nominee Hazel O’Leary stated in her confirmation hearings that she was opposed to energy taxes. And once confirmed by the Senate, Energy Secretary O’Leary further undermined President Clinton during a television interview by providing a per-family cost estimate of the Btu tax that was 50 percent higher than the White House’s own estimate. No such treason so far from current Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Carol Browner is another example. As Obama’s climate change “czar” (officially the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change), Browner presumably is applying her highly acclaimed skills to advancing Obama’s climate agenda. Isn't that a given? Well, as Clinton’s EPA Administrator in the 1990s, Browner ran as far and as fast as she could from the climate change issue. This included eliminating the EPA’s Climate Change Division and muzzling everyone at the agency, including herself, from talking to the media on the subject. And while Clinton and Gore were desperately seeking allies during the public evisceration of the Btu proposal, Browner’s silence was deafening.
So the landscape has changed. But right now fear is rippling among Senate Democrats. Specifically, fear of public backlash against Obama’s financial and health care initiatives, against Senators’ votes on these matters, and in the future against a supposedly costly energy plan. Senators don’t want to be perceived during our recession as causing economic harm to anyone in the form of higher energy costs. Democrats are especially terrified of super-heated Republican diatribes against this new energy “tax,” the dreaded “T” word.
Senators know that Obama needs passage of a climate change bill, while they basically do not. This gives them the leverage to extract maximum concessions from the bill’s supporters before giving it their “Aye” vote. So they will quietly emasculate many of the bill’s remaining tougher provisions and replace them with industry sweeteners in the form of exemptions, subsidies, and regulatory delays.
The Waxman-Markey bill will be less a coherent framework for meaningful policy and more a helping of tired political hash. Requirements for utilities to purchase renewable energy, already modest, will be further eroded. Cap-and-trade will be disemboweled, with the overall cap on pollution being eased and the auctions of pollution permits being further reduced and delayed. The farce of clean coal will get more funding.
But a bill will survive and President Obama will sign it. Members of Congress will pat themselves on the back for passing such “transformational” legislation, as Obama has described it.
Prediction: Some kind of climate bill, perhaps only a passing resemblance of its original self, will make it through the Senate and be signed into law by President Obama. Why? Because failure is not an option. Obama desperately needs passage of a new law as his platform for demonstrating U.S. leadership during the global climate negotiations underway this year. Obama knows that such a bill is his minimum requirement for prodding China, India, and the other recalcitrant major developing countries to make the “meaningful” GHG reductions they promised at the recent G-8 Summit.
U.S. credibility with other countries has been badly damaged during eight years of President George Bush. If the Senate defeats Waxman-Markey, nearly all remaining U.S. credibility would be gone. Any leverage that the U.S. otherwise might have had in this year’s climate talks would be sapped. The U.S. would be exposed as a pampered hypocrite on the issues of energy and climate. Again. China would get a free pass to keep building its weekly coal-fired power plants. It would be a political and policy disaster on an epic scale. Obama and his advisors understand this. They will find a way to get a bill past the Senate. And U.S. GHG emissions will continue rising precipitously.
The good news: There is some. An eventual U.S. climate change law, regardless of how toothless, has more than one purpose. For one, it will represent historic if initially modest changes to the status quo. Clean energy, energy efficiency, green technologies, and a modernized energy infrastructure will begin over time replacing the fossil fuel-based approaches of the past. Two, political momentum will build for further domestic action on climate change. Three, it will be easier in ensuing years to enact strengthening amendments to an existing climate law. And fourth, Obama will use the law as leverage to begin prodding China and other developing countries to reduce their own emissions. Real, if insufficient, progress.
Hollowing out of climate change ambitions has only begun. U.S. Senators, already more conservative than their House counterparts and now given fits of anxiety thanks to today’s fiery health care reform debate, will make the House buzz saw look like a nail file. There are only two possible fates awaiting the Waxman-Markey bill in the Senate, one more ugly than the other.
Scenario #1: It’s 1993 All Over Again
Who remembers what happened with the climate change issue in 1993? Then, as now, we had a visionary young Democratic President determined to change America’s misguided course on energy and climate change. Members of Congress were debating the merits of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, a non-binding pledge to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that was signed by 154 nations during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. (The U.S. signed and ratified the accord that year under the first President Bush.) Warnings of potential climate change impacts from the newly prominent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and from Vice President Al Gore’s 1992 best-seller, Earth in the Balance, helped prod this new debate.
Most notably, President Clinton in his proposed five-year budget plan included a tax on the heat content of fuels as measured in British thermal units. The significance of the Btu proposal was its landmark attempt to apply sound economic principles while achieving pollution reduction. Polluters would be forced to internalize the costs of what heretofore had been an externality – pollution from fuel combustion. The Btu tax was to have applied to coal, crude oil, natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear power.
Republicans were hyperbolic and united in their opposition, fossil fuel-based industries were vehement and unstinting in their warnings of economic doom, and nervous centrist Democrats were unresolved in their misgivings. After urgent White House lobbying, the U.S. House of Representatives on May 19, 1993 barely passed Clinton’s Btu tax proposal, 219-213. Does any of this sound familiar?
The Btu tax then limped over to the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans alike dismissed it as a non-starter before getting down to the business of obliterating it and shoving the carcass into a corner. Its proposed costs were shifted to individual consumers and then ceaselessly whittled away until what was left were faint traces of taxes on gasoline and aviation fuel and a more enthusiastic tax on, jeepers!, personal motorboat fuel. My summer job as an environmental policy analyst for the Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute gave me a front row seat to the ever-disappearing Clinton Administration proposal. My last two of several legislative impacts analyses were regarding the nil impact on consumer driving behavior of first a proposed 6.5 cents-per-gallon gasoline tax and then a proposed 3.4-cent tax.
Now we're back to the future. Although the truth-challenged Global Climate Coalition – a highly potent and influential lobbying organization during the 1990s that denied the reality of climate change on behalf of the oil and coal industries – is mercifully dissolved, many of the organizations that once led it are lobbying as loudly, expensively and effectively today against the Waxman-Markey bill as they did 16 years ago against the Btu tax. These enormously powerful stakeholders include the coal industry, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the utilities that mostly rely on coal. They’ve already succeeded at killing most of the forced purchases of pollution permits, one of the few incentives for industry to reduce fossil fuel use.
Conservative Republicans in Congress remain as bellicose, as impervious to scientific data, and as virulently opposed to addressing the hard facts about climate change as they were in 1993. In dishonest but compelling terms, Republicans are excoriating the Waxman-Markey bill as “the biggest” job-killer and tax increase “in U.S. history.” That is, when they’re not busy still amazingly asserting publicly that climate change is a hoax.
At the same time, according to Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher as reported by David Craig in the university’s Fall 2008 magazine, there are 52 senators from coal-mining states and they “…overwhelmingly vote against bills that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”
How will the U.S. public weigh in? Somebody get Stanley Greenberg to the rescue. Americans are divided along partisan lines about global warming. Further, the Pew Research Center in April 2008 found that fewer than half of Americans believed that pollution is warming up the planet. And while a survey in March of this year found that 59% of the public favored “setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions and making companies pay for their emissions, even if that may mean higher energy prices,” surveys are notorious for respondents’ willingness to tax themselves in theory and for the yawning disconnect between responses now and action later. Large segments of this same public are reeling from the housing and financial collapse and ongoing recession. So a conflicted and distracted general public will not exert much influence on the U.S. Senate.
Who will? Residents across the 26-plus coal- or oil-producing states, plus states where coal is utilities’ dominant fuel. Residents were whipped into opposition in 1993 and they’re rallying again in 2009. Then we have this year’s media darlings – angry, right-wing conservatives, Pat Buchanan’s peasants with pitchforks come to life. They’ll soon pivot from yelling ignorantly against health care reform to yelling ignorantly against addressing climate change. The politically weak and somewhat divided environmental ngo community, despite its millions of members, doesn’t seem to be much of a counterweight.
Think of the resounding political pratfall of 1993 – Hillary’s health care debacle. What is it about improving health care and fighting climate change? Renewing their shared moribund history?
It’s déjà vu all over again. The U.S. Senate will kill President Obama’s signature attempt to pass a new law to finally begin reducing U.S. GHG emissions.
Scenario #2: Victory Trumps Substance
Democrats in the Senate, for all their shrinking resolve, don’t wish to hand the obstructionist Republicans a major victory, nor do they wish to embarrass their party’s president on one of his highest priorities. Further, while the similarities are striking, there are enough significant differences with the dynamics of 1993 to provide the Obama Administration with the muscle and margin needed to steer a climate bill past a grudging U.S. Senate.
Five key differences from 1993: First, the scientific data on climate impacts not only is more certain and more dire, in some cases it’s already here right before our eyes. Examples, unprecedented in recorded human history, include the melting of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, melting of Arctic summer ice that is much faster than anticipated, and the melting of the glaciers astride the European Alps. In the U.S. Senate, such disturbing facts don’t bother the right-wingers in denial, but they do have weight with sober-minded moderate Democrats, which in 1993 was the cohort that sealed Clinton's demise on his Btu tax.
Second, the threat that global climate change poses to U.S. national security is being seriously considered by policy makers for the first time. A recent official Pentagon report cited potentially significant national security risks caused by possible droughts, flooding, and water shortages, which could lead to mass migrations of refugees, outbreaks of illness, and competition for scarce freshwater resources. This provides one more reason for an undecided Democratic Senator or two to throw their support to Obama on this issue.
Third, corporations universally opposed the Btu tax. Today, they are mostly split on the Waxman-Markey bill. As reported in the New York Times, companies that have gone on the record supporting the legislation include General Electric, Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, DuPont, and PG&E. While the political calculations behind such support are usually more subtle than what appears before the naked eye, it is still true that pragmatic and clear-minded business leaders have come to understand the dire risks, including to their profits, posed by global climate change. In addition, business entrepreneurs and many business associations understand that embracing innovation in cleaner fuels, energy efficiency, and green technologies will kindle, not kill, profits and jobs. In the Bay Area alone, such corporate organizations or initiatives include Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network's "Climate Prosperity," the Bay Area Council, New Voice of Business, and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Fourth, the media no longer serves as enablers to climate skeptics as it did in the 1990s, when almost no reporters understood the issue or in particular the science. Focused on journalistic balance in which all supposedly legitimate points of view are equally represented, reporters a decade ago continually gave as much weight in their reportage to the mostly baseless claims of climate skeptics, including fossil fuel industry shills, as they did to the IPCC, the intergovernmental body of scientists formed by the United Nations and 2007 Co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
And fifth, this time we have an administration whose leaders seem truly united and committed on the issue. That wasn’t the case in 1993. Then, Energy Secretary nominee Hazel O’Leary stated in her confirmation hearings that she was opposed to energy taxes. And once confirmed by the Senate, Energy Secretary O’Leary further undermined President Clinton during a television interview by providing a per-family cost estimate of the Btu tax that was 50 percent higher than the White House’s own estimate. No such treason so far from current Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Carol Browner is another example. As Obama’s climate change “czar” (officially the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change), Browner presumably is applying her highly acclaimed skills to advancing Obama’s climate agenda. Isn't that a given? Well, as Clinton’s EPA Administrator in the 1990s, Browner ran as far and as fast as she could from the climate change issue. This included eliminating the EPA’s Climate Change Division and muzzling everyone at the agency, including herself, from talking to the media on the subject. And while Clinton and Gore were desperately seeking allies during the public evisceration of the Btu proposal, Browner’s silence was deafening.
So the landscape has changed. But right now fear is rippling among Senate Democrats. Specifically, fear of public backlash against Obama’s financial and health care initiatives, against Senators’ votes on these matters, and in the future against a supposedly costly energy plan. Senators don’t want to be perceived during our recession as causing economic harm to anyone in the form of higher energy costs. Democrats are especially terrified of super-heated Republican diatribes against this new energy “tax,” the dreaded “T” word.
Senators know that Obama needs passage of a climate change bill, while they basically do not. This gives them the leverage to extract maximum concessions from the bill’s supporters before giving it their “Aye” vote. So they will quietly emasculate many of the bill’s remaining tougher provisions and replace them with industry sweeteners in the form of exemptions, subsidies, and regulatory delays.
The Waxman-Markey bill will be less a coherent framework for meaningful policy and more a helping of tired political hash. Requirements for utilities to purchase renewable energy, already modest, will be further eroded. Cap-and-trade will be disemboweled, with the overall cap on pollution being eased and the auctions of pollution permits being further reduced and delayed. The farce of clean coal will get more funding.
But a bill will survive and President Obama will sign it. Members of Congress will pat themselves on the back for passing such “transformational” legislation, as Obama has described it.
Prediction: Some kind of climate bill, perhaps only a passing resemblance of its original self, will make it through the Senate and be signed into law by President Obama. Why? Because failure is not an option. Obama desperately needs passage of a new law as his platform for demonstrating U.S. leadership during the global climate negotiations underway this year. Obama knows that such a bill is his minimum requirement for prodding China, India, and the other recalcitrant major developing countries to make the “meaningful” GHG reductions they promised at the recent G-8 Summit.
U.S. credibility with other countries has been badly damaged during eight years of President George Bush. If the Senate defeats Waxman-Markey, nearly all remaining U.S. credibility would be gone. Any leverage that the U.S. otherwise might have had in this year’s climate talks would be sapped. The U.S. would be exposed as a pampered hypocrite on the issues of energy and climate. Again. China would get a free pass to keep building its weekly coal-fired power plants. It would be a political and policy disaster on an epic scale. Obama and his advisors understand this. They will find a way to get a bill past the Senate. And U.S. GHG emissions will continue rising precipitously.
The good news: There is some. An eventual U.S. climate change law, regardless of how toothless, has more than one purpose. For one, it will represent historic if initially modest changes to the status quo. Clean energy, energy efficiency, green technologies, and a modernized energy infrastructure will begin over time replacing the fossil fuel-based approaches of the past. Two, political momentum will build for further domestic action on climate change. Three, it will be easier in ensuing years to enact strengthening amendments to an existing climate law. And fourth, Obama will use the law as leverage to begin prodding China and other developing countries to reduce their own emissions. Real, if insufficient, progress.
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