Death of the Climate Bill

The New York Times wrote yesterday Democrats Call Off Climate Bill Effort "The effort to advance a major climate change bill through the Senate this summer collapsed Thursday even as President Obama signed into law another top Democratic priority — a bill to restore unemployment benefits for millions of Americans who have been out of work for six months or more. Bowing to political reality, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said the Senate would not take up legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions blamed as a cause of climate change, but would instead pursue a more limited measure focused on responding to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and tightening energy efficiency standards."

I guess keeping the planet habitable just isn't important enough.

Kevin Drum wrote about Obama and Climate Change. "This has been a pure vote whipping exercise from the start, and the votes were never there. Aside from common sense, there are two big pieces of evidence for this. First, the House climate bill, even after massive compromises, passed by only 219-212. That is, it won by one vote in a chamber where Democrats hold a 35-vote majority. Second, when Lisa Murkowski's bill to prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases came before the Senate, the vote against it was only 53-47. As Dickinson notes, six Democrats voted for it: Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Ben Nelson, and Jay Rockefeller. Aside from Lindsey Graham, there were never going to be any Republican votes for a climate bill. If we in the liberal community still haven't figured that out, we have rocks in our skulls. And it's almost certain that three or four of those six Democrats were simply unpersuadable too. Even a watered-down climate bill never had more than about 55 votes in the Senate, and even that's probably optimistic.

Still, Dickinson is right that Obama should have done more. Even if the bill lost anyway, he should have done more. It's his job, after all, to rally public opinion... His problem isn't that he worked an inside game on Capitol Hill or gave a weak speech after the Gulf spill, the problem is that he's barely talked about climate change for years. Even if he had, the spark that it takes to get it done might still not have come. But without it, it will never come."

Matthew Yglesias wrote about The Death of Comprehensive Climate Legislation and points out the GOP cynicism. "The fact that McCain and other Republicans supported the goal of reducing carbon emissions and support carbon pricing as the means of reducing carbon emissions is the whole reason anyone ever thought reducing carbon emissions via carbon pricing was feasible. When they decided—for no clear reason—that they no longer held this view, they doomed the idea to defeat."

And you wouldn't know this from reading the standard press articles reporting one side and the other equally, Scientific expertise lacking among 'doubters' of climate change, says new analysis "The small number of scientists who are unconvinced that human beings have contributed significantly to climate change have far less expertise and prominence in climate research compared with scientists who are convinced, according to a study led by Stanford researchers."

But even if you choose to be ignorant and ignore science, there are other considerations, What happens when we run out of oil and coal?. "Many of the plans for addressing climate change rely on 20- to 50-year roadmaps of increased efficiency and use of renewable energy. But, as Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin pointed out in his talk at the Lindau Meeting, we're going to have to deal with alternative technologies on that time scale no matter what—many projections indicate we're going to be out of oil within 60 years (usable coal will last a century and a half longer, give or take). So, even if you don't think climate change is something to worry about, Laughlin suggested you might want to be thinking about the sorts of technologies we'd need to do without fossil fuels—and that, in turn, requires some thought about what existing technologies we'd want to bring forward."

Are there alternatives to the federal legislation?

The Times' Green Blog writes After the Climate Bill Failure "Can federal and state governments move ahead under existing law to achieve some or all of the greenhouse gas reductions envisioned in the failed legislation? Just in time comes a report from the respected World Resources Institute attempting to answer just that question...The bottom line: If federal agencies and state governments pursue the most ambitious paths available, the United States could achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gases that approach but fall short of the 17 percent."

Joe Klein points out MA v. EPA, There Will Be An Energy Bill...soon. "Why? Because there is a Supreme Court ruling, now three years old, that carbon dioxide is a poison that needs to be cleaned up. Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin regulating the hell out of Co2. The business community won't like that, nor will many Republicans. "Putting a price on carbon is the only alternative," says Senator Maria Cantwell, who has offered a bill--with Maine Republican Susan Collins as co-sponsor--that would force the 2000 top polluters to participate in an auction to purchase the right to spew; 75% of the income would be returned as a "dividend" to taxpayers, the other 25% would go to alternative energy. "There's no question that we will have a bill before the EPA regulations kick in." "

Then again maybe the followup legislation isn't so good. Natural Gas Vehicles, Here We Come. "So the big winner of the climate-bill fiasco could turn out to be… T. Boone Pickens. That's right, the billionaire who financed the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in 2004. According to Harry Reid, the slimmed-down energy bill that's getting introduced next week will include four parts: Some new oil-spill regulations, money for land and water conservation, incentives for home efficiency, and—this one's the kicker—money to "invest in the manufacturing of natural gas vehicles." (well trucks)."