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>>> Edward Mainland <emainland@COMCAST.NET> 8/2/2010 1:38 PM >>>
Where next for the wrecked US climate bill?
There is a chance to build on the rubble of the Senate's failure to cap
carbon emissions, says Eric Pooley

Eric Pooley for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment
Network, Thursday 29 July 2010 14.57 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/29/wrecked-us-climate-
bill

Senate Democrats hope to pass a narrower energy bill this week that
would increase the liability of companies for oil spills, for instance
in the Gulf of Mexico. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Following the rocky path of climate legislation in the U.S. Congress
these past years brought me back to the 1980s, and my time as a crime
reporter in New York City. After a shooting in those days, a homicide
detective named Marty Davin would go to the hospital and intercept the
gunshot victim on a gurney outside the emergency room. If the victim
was conscious, Davin would lean over and ask, "Who killed you?"

That usually got the victim's attention, along with an I'm-not-dead-yet
protest. Davin would reply, "You are going to die. You might as well
tell me who did it."

As I interviewed the sponsor of whichever emissions-reduction bill had
just been gunned down, I often thought of Davin. The politicians and
climate campaigners would assure me that they were still alive —
passage of a carbon cap was inevitable, they'd say — and I'd remind
myself that they had survived countless near-death experiences.

But what happened last week, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
announced he would not even try to bring a compromise climate bill to
the Senate floor, was not just another setback. Sometimes dead really
is dead — and for this Congress, barring a miracle, climate action is
finished. With an ugly election looming in November, it may be years
before we get another chance to debate a bill that prices carbon. And
the consensus approach to federal climate action — the idea that cap-
and-trade was the most politically viable policy — may well be dead,
too.

This is a time to take stock. The first question is whether this was a
failure of policy; a failure of politics, message, and messenger; or
both? Second, is there a Plan B around which the climate campaign
should now unify? And third, what needs to be done to allow a better
outcome when the next opportunity finally does appear?

No one who follows climate politics could have been very surprised by
Reid's move. The bigger shock was his decision to remove from the bill
a mandate that utilities must generate 15 percent of their electricity
from renewable sources. (Proponents hope to offer it as a floor
amendment.) It was if the Senate was saying: Anything remotely
effective, we're not going to do.

When Reid pulled the plug, I thought back to a snowy afternoon in
Copenhagen last December. Sitting with Al Gore in an empty hotel café,
I asked him to contemplate this very moment. "If the United States
doesn't act," he replied, "if the Senate defeats the legislation or
waters it down to a point where it is not even worth having a bill,
that is an event horizon beyond which it is difficult to see."

He parsed the same issues then that climate campaigners are parsing
now: "It may mean there is a fundamental flaw in the international
political approach, but I'm not sure there is a good alternative. The
reality is so dire that a new plan would have to emerge — but just now
I can't imagine what it would be."

Gore had a point. When the goal is emissions reduction, there aren't
many alternatives: You've got to reduce emissions. The Plan B options
now being offered by various advocates should be vigorously debated,
but all of them seem vulnerable to the same polluted politics that
killed the cap. Advocates of the carbon tax are ready to take a run at
their goal, and Godspeed — but it is hard to see how politicians who
were terrified to support a cap (because opponents labeled it a tax)
will suddenly become bold enough to support a carbon tax. Policy groups
such as the Breakthrough Institute argue that instead of making dirty
fuels more expensive, it's time for intensive energy research and
development to make clean fuels cheaper. That sounds reasonable, but
without the revenue stream that a cap or tax would provide — and in an
era of budget cutbacks — it is hard to see government supplying the
massive, long-term funding their plan requires.

Is the cap so fundamentally flawed that it should be abandoned forever?
I don't think so. I believe it needs to be liberated from legislative
bloat and rehabilitated as a modest first step: a tool for regulating
power sector emissions, the job it performed so successfully in the
1990s, when America tamed acid rain. It's worth remembering that while
climate politics were bogging down, climate policy mechanisms were
being improved. Clever wonks found ways to cushion consumers and high-
carbon industries from the price impact of the cap, while preserving a
price signal for generators. Trading restrictions were added to keep
speculators out of the carbon game. Though the term cap-and-trade has
been demonized, the cap itself isn't broken.

Some will argue that this latest setback is proof that the U.S. will
never cap carbon. I reject that view. All we can say for sure is that
the U.S. will never cap or price carbon until the politics of the issue
change — so the first order of business must be to begin improving the
political atmosphere. During the three years I worked on The Climate
War, a narrative of the campaign to pass a carbon cap, I came to
realize I was writing a political thriller, a whodunit with multiple
culprits. Let's look for lessons by considering some of the culprits,
starting with the most obvious.

1. The Professional Deniers. Gore and environmental leaders made a
tactical error several years ago when they declared the science
"settled" and refused to engage the forces of denial and delay. The
basic science was indeed settled, but the resulting message vacuum was
the perfect medium for those who sow doubt and confusion about global
climate change. It shouldn't be surprising that so many Americans
remain skeptical about global warming. For 20 years, this loose network
of PR pros, working for industry associations and anti-tax think tanks,
has spread doubt about climate science and fear about climate
economics, claiming that any attempt to cap CO2 would wreck the
American economy. Their disinformation, amplified via the Internet,
helped poison the debate. To counter the deniers' campaign, President
Obama needs to speak out forcefully, and champions of the clean energy
economy must point to the new jobs that are already being created by
the renewable energy economy and show Americans precisely where they
fit into it.

2. Senate Republicans. Most climate campaigners understand the folly of
trying to remake the American energy system without bipartisan support.
But it's hard to forge centrist solutions when an entire party is
denying there's a problem and vilifying the solutions. A scaled-back
approach, one that can be sold as a modest, incremental step and not a
new industrial revolution, might fare better.

There was a time — 2007 and 2008, to be precise — when some Republicans
were moving away from deny-and-delay tactics. (In 2007, briefly, Newt
Gingrich supported the carbon cap.) More recently, opposition to
climate action has become a litmus test in the GOP. Arizona

Republican John McCain, who sponsored the Senate's first serious
climate bills but now faces a primary challenge from the right,
recently called a successor bill "a farce." His mantle of Republican
climate courage passed to Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who took so
much heat from his own party that he withdrew from the climate bill he
helped write. Graham's position has been incoherent since then, but he
has signaled support for a cap on the power sector. That could be
something to build on.

3. Senate Democrats. After Reid pulled the plug, Democrats were quick
to blame Republicans for obstruction. But what about the
obstructionists within the Democratic ranks? Harry Reid didn't have the
clout to force action on this issue because a dozen or more centrist
Democrats — from states that either mine coal or produce much of their
electricity from it — were dug in against it. It is impossible to tell
if the senators were truly concerned about what the cap would do to
their state economies — nonpartisan studies suggest its impact would be
minimal — or just worried about what attack ads would do to them.
Again, a more modest first step could change the dynamic. The crucial
thing is to get started.

4. The Green Group. At a meeting in February 2007, the Green Group, an
unofficial association of the leaders of the big U.S. environmental
non-profits, told Harry Reid they supported a single legislative goal:
An economy-wide cap. Their strategy was to assemble the broadest
possible coalition to push the broadest possible bill. Given the
magnitude of the crisis and the need to reduce emissions quickly, this
made sense. Politically, though, it proved disastrous, because it led
to bills of such cost, scope, and complexity that they scared the pants
off timid legislators.

The Green Group held out for an economy-wide bill even after it became
clear, in late 2009, that it was unachievable in the Senate. Only
recently did

5. The Power Barons. When the eleventh-hour search for a compromise
began, the utilities got too greedy. If they had to go it alone, they
argued, they deserved virtually all of the carbon allowances in the
program for free. This left too few for other crucial purposes, such as
cushioning manufacturers from higher electricity prices. Worse, in
exchange for supporting a carbon cap, some utilities demanded relief
from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations governing
conventional pollutants such as mercury. Like the greens, they asked
for too much and got nothing. (The greens, however, were overreaching
on behalf of the planet, not their own coffers.) Some utility bosses
were relieved to see the bill die. Those feelings may prove short-lived
as the battle to reduce emissions moves to the EPA and the courts.

Some advocates, such as Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund,
regard the decision to negotiate with the power barons as the height of
folly. Washington, they argue, should simply dictate the terms of
surrender to the polluters. Such a stance ignores an important fact: It
isn't possible to remake the U.S. energy system without negotiating
with the power barons. Punishing generators means punishing households
that pay electricity bills. That doesn't mean, however, that the
politicians should give the barons everything they want. But there was
only one player with the clout to cut a fair deal with them, and he was
missing in action.

6. The President. Barack Obama chose not to lead on this issue. His
decision to address health care reform before energy and climate change
doomed the latter. With advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod
whispering that climate was a losing proposition (a self-fulfilling
prophesy, to be sure), Obama never threw himself behind a particular
climate bill. He left it to the Senate, the Green Group, and the power
bosses — all of whom were sorely in need of adult supervision.

The real grownups in this tale were Rep. Henry Waxman and Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, who last year surprised the Obama Administration by taking a
comprehensive climate bill to the House floor. The White House had no
choice but to help whip the vote, and it passed. Then Obama stopped
trying, and the Senate refused to take up the legislation. It was a
colossal failure of nerve, and a decision that likely destroyed any
chance of achieving climate action in Obama's first term.

Since the president and his political advisers thought an economy-wide
cap was too heavy a lift, Obama should have led a tactical retreat to
what, in the past several months, became the last-ditch compromise
position: the cap on the electric power sector. Had negotiations
focused on this months ago instead of weeks ago, and had the president
thrown his weight behind it then, we might today be celebrating a step
forward instead of mourning another failure. Only Obama had the
authority to call this audible early. The environmental NGOs and their
allies were too invested in the economy-wide approach; they needed
Obama to lead them.

He refused. To the bitter end, the White House pursued what his aides
called a "stealth strategy" that deployed the president only sparingly.
As a result, he failed to take advantage of the BP oil spill. When its
terrible scope became apparent, in June, Obama began talking about the
need to cap carbon and accelerate the transition to clean energy. But
it was a fleeting moment. Many climate campaigners knew the climate
bill was dead on June 15, when Obama gave his long-awaited Oval Office
address on the oil spill. Instead of making an explicit connection to
the climate bill — and explaining that by capping carbon the U.S. could
speed its transition to clean energy and help break its addiction to
fossil fuels — Obama whiffed. He had a road map but didn't try to share
it with the people. "We don't yet know precisely how we're going to get
there," he said. Today, with that map in shreds, we surely don't.

As climate campaigners wait however long it takes to get another shot
at legislation, there is important work to be done. Greenhouse gas
emissions in the U.S. have been dropping — and not just because of the
recession. The task is to build on this trend during the economic
recovery. Changes in our energy infrastructure are making this
possible. In Texas, our highest-emitting state and a bastion of climate
skepticism, carbon emissions have been declining since 2004 thanks in
part to a renewable energy standard — signed into law by then-Gov.
George W. Bush — that accelerated the installation of wind power and
created thousands of jobs along the way.

The Department of Energy now has 7,000 clean energy projects across the
country — projects that save money, create jobs, and reduce emissions.
According to an analysis by the World Resources Institute, by
leveraging existing authority over the next ten years the U.S. could
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent to 12 percent below 2005
levels. This is far short of the 17 percent reduction Obama promised in
Copenhagen and nothing close to what needs to be done. But if we
continue cutting emissions before asking voters to embrace a cap, we
prove that cuts are both technologically feasible and economically
sustainable. And we'll be in a better position when the next
legislative opportunity comes.

Until then, the climate war will be waged by cities, states, regional
cap-and-trade programs, and, above all, the EPA, which early next year
is set to begin regulating stationary sources of CO2 — power plants and
large factories.

Welcome to the "glorious mess" — Michigan Rep. John Dingell's phrase
for the tangle of regulation and litigation that will follow when
Congress fails to act. We are about to experience precisely the sort of
costly, protracted, plant-by-plant trench warfare the cap was intended
to avoid. Since the utilities and the manufacturers weren't willing to
cut a deal, this is what they get. The fragile period of compromise and
cooperation between environmentalists and big business may now be
coming to an end. Green groups that have invested time and money into
the legislative process are now putting on their war paint and
returning to the courts, with a renewed focus on stopping new coal-
fired power plants and shutting down the oldest and dirtiest ones.

Tough new EPA rules for conventional pollutants will help, and so will
new EPA carbon regulations. Perhaps these strict new regulations will
refresh the power bosses' appetite for a cap. But they have plenty of
lawyers, and the long, ugly battles over implementation of EPA
regulations could extend the current period of uncertainty by many
years. Republicans (and some Democrats) will try to strip EPA of its
authority over carbon, or at least delay implementation of its new
rules.

In effect, the Senate will be saying that Congress alone should have
the power to act — so that it can then not exercise that power. Obama's
aides say the president will be fully engaged in the battle to save EPA
authority over carbon. It is a fight that he can't possibly duck,
because it is our last line of defense. As Gore reminded me in
Copenhagen, "The fact that this is extremely hard doesn't mean we
should quit."

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