Three cheers for Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry. In September they introduced S. 1733, “The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” the Senate’s legislative vehicle to realize President Obama’s climate change ambitions, and on November 5 it passed Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. So much for the good news.
The 959-page bill passed the Democratic wing of the committee by 11-1, with Democrat and Finance Committee chair Max Baucus opposing and Republicans unanimously boycotting. Baucus is not the only Democrat loath to address global warming, and in the U.S. Senate, with its labyrinth of arcane rules and procedures, having just a tiny handful of your own party’s members opposed while the other party is united against can signify imminent defeat.
It’s the same woebegone domestic politics bedeviling the climate change issue as before, with Democrats fearful and divided about responding and Republicans united in their intransigence. President Obama’s original game plan – to have a robust, new climate change law in hand to show global climate negotiators at Copenhagen that the U.S. finally means business – is looking like yesterday’s news and today’s fish wrap.
Much work remains undone for the December 7-18 Copenhagen summit, but world leaders are sitting on their hands. They remember the U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, so they’ve decided that this time they’re going to wait for the Senate to act first. Todd Stern, President Obama’s climate envoy, told reporters in September that due to the Senate’s lack of alacrity he expects that work to complete an international climate framework will be pushed into 2010, well after Copenhagen’s hotels empty out.
Even if a climate change bill passes Congress, it will be threadbare. Both the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House and the draft Boxer-Kerry bill contain weak emissions reductions targets, with the former calling for an “excuse me” 17 percent reduction of carbon dioxide from 2005 levels by 2020 and the latter currently calling for a 20 percent reduction. Both bills provide years of free pollution permits to fossil fuel-burning utilities.
President Obama, in response, has been alternately determined and distracted. A special United Nations summit on global climate change, called in late September by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, represented Obama’s first opportunity for a speech before the august gathering. As reported in several New York Times stories on September 22 and 23, Obama made a stark departure from the previous Bush administration, speaking forcefully about the threat of global climate change and exhorting the other world leaders to action. But he also tacked on something of a disclaimer. He mentioned that the world was grappling with a recession, followed by stating, “And so all of us will face doubts and difficulties in our capitals as we try to reach a….solution to the climate challenge.” Was Obama trying to lower expectations for Congress? For Copenhagen? Was this, in fact, his first public cave-in to desultory climate change politics? Or was he instead innocently demonstrating to other world leaders that he understood their pain?
What we do know is that this is a time for some high-pressure, Lyndon Johnson-style pressuring, admonishing, cajoling, and hammering of individuals in Congress. History will render judgment on the far too many of them who refuse to accept the responsibilities of leadership. Environmental organizations are urgently doing what they can, but will anyone rescue the world from Congress’s climate change torpor?
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