Stop Him Before He Capitulates Again!

Having done his best to destroy the health care bill, Max Baucus wants a stab at the climate change bill.

But while Baucus has been the public face of health care negotiations, a dedicated team of his aides has been working on the climate bill. As the Finance Committee chairman and the second-most-senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Baucus is in a uniquely powerful position on climate issues.

The Finance Committee is charged with overseeing the flow of money in and out of government, a jurisdiction that Baucus believes gives his committee control over how hundreds of billions of dollars in pollution allocations would be distributed to industry and consumers under a cap-and-trade system.

That turf puts Baucus in direct conflict with Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who believes her committee has control over cap-and-trade allocations. Boxer would fold the provisions into her broader climate and energy bill, which would establish caps on greenhouse gas emissions for the next several decades, according to Senate Democratic aides.

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who’s working with Boxer to draft the climate and energy bill, says they are still working out the jurisdictional dispute with Baucus.

I've got a way to work it out. Tell him, "Butt out or we'll take your gavel away." Seriously, nobody elected Max Baucus President, and his philosophy does not reflect the majority of Democrats in the Senate, let alone in the country. Senate Dems have been talking about a way to have secret votes to keep committee chairs on top of their committees - it's beyond time to brandish that as a weapon.

My other question is, how the hell does a coal-state Dem get to be #2 in rank on the Environment and Public Works Committee?

Oh, And The Climate Change Bill Is Doomed, Too

With the health care bill stalling, the climate change bill, already passed by the House, has been delayed again by the Senate.

U.S. Senate Democrats announced on Monday a new delay on climate change legislation, which could make it more difficult for President Barack Obama to win progress on that front before a global environmental summit in December.

Already facing a tough fight in the Senate and dwindling time before the summit to pass a bill, Democrats said they would not be able to unveil their legislation until "later in September."

Initially, the plan was to introduce a Senate bill to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for global warming by around late July -- a timetable that had already slipped to early September before the latest delay.

Just as the delays in the health care bill allowed conservatives to organize, delaying the climate bill will give industry the jump. Most of them cannot be bought off the way the White House clumsily attempted in the health care debate. Duke Energy, one of the few companies willing to deal on climate legislation, admitted as much to the National Journal, saying that "influential member companies ... would never support climate legislation no matter what." And so we're already seeing the same kind of anti-climate change astroturf events, and the response from enviros has been weak, so put it mildly.

Meanwhile, those Republicans with designs on getting elected again are never going to join any kind of climate legislation. The so-called moderates are already falling away.

Gov. Crist Nixes Joining RGGI or Pursuing State Emission Curbs; Will Defer to Feds

Tallahassee - Florida Governor Charlie Crist has decided that his state will not join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) or pursue further major efforts to combat climate change, according to a notice released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Florida, once a leader among states in addressing climate issues, instead will sit on the sidelines and await the outcome of federal cap-and-trade legislation.

Rather than issue a public announcement, Florida's decision was communicated to other Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic state members of RGGI that the Sunshine State would not participate in the upcoming September 9, 2009 auction of greenhouse gas emission allowances. In addition, Gov. Crist "will not be presenting a proposed cap-and-trade rule to the 2010 Legislature," stated the notice quoting Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokeswoman Amy Graham.

Remember that Crist's sock-puppet, George LeMieux, got installed into the US Senate. So much for a gettable Republican vote from Florida.

If health care goes down, forget about this bill seeing the light of day. The move is actually to take it up before the health care bill gets going, to forestall the expected delay. But I see no indication that the Senate has anywhere near the votes to pass anything worth a damn. And reconciliation instructions were never given on this bill, making it not an option.

Astroturfing Is Now A Viewpoint, But A Fact

The idea that astroturf campaigns exist for the expressed purpose of maintaining the status quo for corporate America is no longer a viewpoint, it's a hard fact with significant documentation.

A Bonner and Associates Background Document, obtained late Monday by EnviroKnow, sheds additional new light on the extent of the fraud (emphasis mine):

Due to reported misconduct by a Bonner and Associates employee (who the firm states was subsequently fired), it appears that a total of twelve falsified letters were sent by that firm to the offices of Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, Congressman Christopher Carney and Congressman Tom Perriello.

Six forged letters, all sent to Congressman Perriello, had been acknowledged previously. While Congressman Perriello remained unswayed by the letters, and voted in support of the legislation, Reps. Dahlkemper and Carney both did not. This raises the very real possibility that Members of Congress were influenced by fraudulent letters paid for by the coal industry, and voted against environmental regulation as a result of this influence. Given the razor thin margin and last-minute negotiations surrounding the House vote, this was a clear attempt by both Bonner and Associates and ACCCE to subvert the Democratic process. Now, we can’t say for with 100% certainty that fraudulent letters persuaded any particular Member of Congress to oppose the legislation, but that was certainly the intent.

This is not a "viewpoint". It's a documented fact. And the town hall Brooks Brothers riots are a manifestation of the same game plan.

Constituent Letter Grifting

Last week, we learned about astroforging, the practice of corporate lobbyists forging letters from local advocacy groups that line up with corporate goals. More evidence has been uncovered today showing the widespread nature of this practice.

Joseph Richardson received a letter from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) in reply to a letter that he never sent:



Richardson never wrote such a letter, and he never would. Calling himself a “vocal member” of the North Dakota Alliance for Renewable Energy, Richardson told ThinkProgress that he is an ACES supporter and even wrote a letter to Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) calling on the congressman to support clean energy reform.

Bonner and Associates, the company nailed initially, has been engaged in this deception for well over 20 years. And as long as they got away with it, I'm sure they'd continue. It turns out that Bonner is linked to the clean coal lobby:

The Sierra Club today urged Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation into the activities of a lobbying firm that has been linked to fake letters urging Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) to vote against the climate bill [...]

The request stems from a newspaper report last week that Bonner & Associates sent letters to Perriello's office that were made to look as if they came from Creciendo Juntos, a Charlottesville-based Hispanic advocacy group. Perriello staffers also received similarly worded letters that were designed to look as if they came from the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The letters, which urged Perriello to oppose the House climate bill ( H.R. 2454 ), used the letterhead of the two groups but were signed by individuals who are not affiliated with the organizations ( E&ENews PM , July 31).

The group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity acknowledged this afternoon that it had contracted Bonner & Associates earlier to perform "limited outreach," but the advocacy group denounced the firm's actions.

It's insane that Democratic lawmakers are going out of their way to label the August recess as "consequential" for health care based on the reaction of constituents in districts, when this nasty little episode shows how it's all just theater and lies.

UPDATE: Think Progress has corrected this story. Conrad's office miscategorized their response letter. The Perriello set of letters, however, are certainly real, which is to say fake. Brad Johnson has more.

Astroforging

Creating fake grassroots organizations to show presumed local support for typically corporate initiatives is known as astroturfing. Corporate lobbies forging letters from local groups to show that same fake support should be called... I don't know, astroforging?

As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure.

The letters, as it turns out, were forgeries.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

The faked letter from Creciendo Juntos was signed by “Marisse K. Acevado, Asst Member Coordinator,” an identity and position at Creciendo Juntos that do not exist.

The person who sent the letter has not been identified, but he or she was employed by a Washington lobbying firm called Bonner & Associates.

Staffers found five forged letters of this type, including one from the local chapter of the NAACP, just in Perriello's correspondence. So you know there are lots more. This seems like the uncovering of a scam that's been going on for years. Ed Markey wants an investigation from his perch in the Global Warming subcommittee.

Obviously the power of lobbyists has grown so much to become completely divorced from the Constitutional mission of petitioning government for redress of grievances. Lobby shops have funded and supported the teabaggers, and they're offering training sessions on how to approach town hall meetings during the August recess. They are busing people around the country to different town halls. Members of Congress somehow still think these meetings reflect the considered opinions of constituents. They should look at Tom Perriello's mail.

Why Postponing Health Care Hurts Climate Change

Another factor to breaking for a three-week recess before finishing work on the health care bill is that it pushes everything back in the queue. There are serious efforts to arrive at legislation on financial regulation, as well as the Senate's version of a climate and energy bill already passed by the House, that now necessarily get moved aside. And in the meantime, energy and activist attention goes away from those priorities. It gives know-nothings like George Will more time to sow doubt and throw up meaningless statistics to make verifiably false claims about the condition of the planet. Even people who are on the side of doing something about climate change have contributed to this by raising unfounded fears about speculation in the cap and trade market and the dangers of Wall Street involvement (simply put, there are mechanisms to ban derivatives in Waxman-Markey, and the survival of the planet outranks the desire to deny profit to those trading carbon). It gives lobbyists more time to marshal their forces against anything but the status quo. And unlike with health care, where the progressive movement has focused for some time, on climate change the denialists are much further along in their activism, and delay actually will sap the fortitude of lawmakers.

The opposition to Waxman-Markey did a good job with phone calls to House members. They at least matched the calls that enviros and progressives delivered — though I’m told an analysis shows that most of their calls were out-of-state, while most of ours were in state. Still, that’s one reason we didn’t get more votes.

The climate destroyers are keeping up their attack on vulnerable House members — even if it means eating their own (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy”).

The good news is that The Hill reports, “A coalition of labor, environmental and veterans groups is spending serious money to make sure Democrats who supported the cap-and-trade legislation have political cover.” Very important stuff, for sure — after all, the House is going to have to vote again on some House-Senate conference version of this bill in early 2010 assuming the Senate acts.

But we should be equaling, if not beating, calls to key senators right now. Heck, I’m told that Senators who aren’t even really swing votes are getting more than 100 calls a day opposing climate action. And those matter too, in terms of how even Senators on our side gauge public sentiment and how much they are willing to fight for the strongest possible bill.

That has a cumulative effect, even if members of the Senate want to pass good legislation. And hanging House members out to dry who voted for Waxman-Markey with nothing to show for it will damage them in 2010. Right now, the Senate is engaged in a zero-sum game, and at the end of the year, they might welcome having those three weeks back when they look at what they failed to produce.

Direct Line Between Weakness Of Climate Bill And Weak Public Reaction

The Senate version of the climate and energy bill has been delayed until September, which means a few more months of debates over whether it's worth it to pass at all. The Waxman-Markey climate bill included so many compromises and hedges and backdowns that many, including the respected Dr. James Hansen, find it unworthy of passage.

With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.

I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.

Some, like Joseph Romm, disagree violently with this.

Hansen claims "For all its 'green' aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like 'cap-and-trade' scheme." Not so. I have previously explained why W-M takes us sharply off of the BAU emissions path over the next decade, probably reducing coal use more than 25% by 2020 (see "Game changer, Part 2: Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet"). And then it requires a 42% emissions reduction by 2030 and an 83% reduction by 2050, which will drive a massive energy transition over the next few decades.

The global economy is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but this is the first piece of legislation by any major country that makes a serious effort to end that Ponzi scheme.

You can read both of these efforts and draw your own conclusions. I would simply say that the environmental community, including people like Hansen, have generally failed to create the urgency necessary to pass the kind of bill he would prefer. All you have to do is look at this recent poll, showing that less than half of all Americans believe that climate change is the result of human activity. This may not even be the fault of Hansen and climate activists - this problem is uniquely ill-suited for the American political system to solve. It's long-term and not entirely tangible. It forces parochial lawmakers to act in the global interest. But the facts are that under the current structure, a straight-up carbon tax cannot pass, and anyway would be completely flawed with numerous loopholes, because it would have to run the exact same gauntlet that the Waxman-Markey bill has. It's dishonest to glorify all the positives of a bill that hasn't been through that ringer, and demonize the negatives of one that has.

Many climate activists have been valiant - Greenpeace draping a banner on Mount Rushmore is fantastic - but they have not broken through in the popular imagination. We have not seen the kind of pressure necessary, and furthermore the mainline enviro groups have been happy to pass whatever they can pass, and signaled that so early in the debate that they nullified any effect they could have on lawmakers, and disappointed progressives who could mount energy on that score. As a result you get politicians happy to take duplicitous stances like this:

I sent several emails to Rep. Glenn Nye urging his support for the ACES climate change bill and more emails expressing my disappointment after he voted against it.

I received two different emails from him in response:

In one email, Nye said I will be pleased to know the bill passed, praising it as "a comprehensive approach that charts a new course toward a clean energy economy" and "will create jobs, help end our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and combat global warming" (without ever mentioning that he voted against it).

In the other email, Nye said I will be pleased to know that he voted against it "because we do not need another tax on American families during this time of economic hardship."

Oops! Nye can't have it both ways. Thelma Drake was consistently wrong, but at least she was consistent.

The environmental community simply must find other ways to intensify the debate. Otherwise, our political system will not produce what's necessary.

Know-Nothings Stopping GOP Potential Victories

Chris Cillizza reported that Mark Kirk wouldn't run for the Senate seat in Illinois being vacated by Roland Burris. Roll Call has Kirk still mulling things over.

Here's the subtext, picked up by Cillizza:

It also followed a meeting of the Illinois Republican congressional delegation on Thursday in which his colleagues refused to back Kirk in a primary against Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna due, in large part, to his vote in favor of President Barack Obama's climate change bill.

Kirk's move makes McKenna the almost certain Republican nominee against either state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias or Merchandise Mart CEO Chris Kennedy next fall.

Because flat-earthers in the Republican Party don't believe in science, they cannot except anyone to the left of Attilla the Hun to represent them. Despite the fact that Kirk - and pretty much only Kirk - has a shot to win that Senate seat, as one of the Gang of Eight who voted for a modest, not-even-good-enough bill to begin the process of unboiling the planet, he is verboten from running.

We need a multi-party system in this country. Right now, we have liberals and conservatives smushed into the Democratic Party, and General Jack D. Ripper Bircher types in the other one.

The Climate Saga: Too Much For The Senate, Not Enough For The World

Though there were early indications that the House package of the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill were spurring the development of similar policies abroad, among the Europeans who have already set up a cap and trade system for carbon emissions, the relatively weak standards forced into the bill by Blue Dogs and farm-state Democrats have them looking unkindly at it:

The European hosts of the Group of 8 summit meeting welcome the shift. But the new stance also worries them, in part because they fear that the United States is working toward an independent deal with China outside the global negotiating framework.

President Obama has stated a commitment to addressing climate change. That has been followed by the recent passage by the House of a landmark bill that, if also approved by the Senate, would begin to regulate heat-trapping gases. Those moves have given the Europeans, as well as climate scientists and some environmental groups, hope that the United States will take a leadership role in global talks toward a new climate-change treaty [...]

But Europe is also unhappy with the Obama administration’s reluctance to accept aggressive near-term goals for cutting greenhouse gases and its refusal so far to formally accept language that would limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels [...]

The president and other American policy makers also insist that no deal can effectively reduce emissions unless China, India and other major developing countries are on board. The United States has been pursuing a separate track of climate diplomacy directly with Beijing.

Michael Starbaek Christensen, a senior climate-change official in Denmark, said he was worried that the United States and China — the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world — would cut a separate deal and push the rest of the world into a treaty that did too little to curb emissions.

“I can only encourage Europe to stay in the lead and not let a bilateral U.S.-China relationship take over,” Mr. Christensen said, “because one concern I would have with the U.S.-China relationship is that they would find a lower common denominator.”

The G8 leaders could not even agree on the same aspirational targets of a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 that George Bush agreed to in Japan at the G8 in 2008. Put simply, the rest of the developed world finds the US targets too low. I agree with them, but of course our political process is almost uniquely wired against coming to a solution that matches the needs in the science. Plus we have an entire political party composed of denialists from the Exxon Mobil school of Energy Policy.

In the first Senate hearing today on clean energy legislation supported by President Barack Obama, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) compared the Senate to the “ExxonMobil board room.” Whitehouse expressed his concern that the United States would be left behind in the clean energy race, saying, “I do not want to see American industries at the back of that parade with a broom.” Addressing the Obama Cabinet members before him — Ken Salazar, Stephen Chu, Tom Vilsack, and Lisa Jackson — Whitehouse apologized for the denial of man-made climate change by his fellow senators:

"We know that this is probably — along with the ExxonMobil board room — the last place that sober people debate whether or not these problems are real, but we intend to work with you anyway, and we hope to give you strong legislative support if we can."

As I've often said, with climate change being a "boiling frog," intangible kind of concern, it's hard for me to believe that a Democrat from Idaho, for example, will face negative consequences from his No vote on Waxman-Markey. I'd like to be wrong about that. But the dynamics just haven't moved in the right direction yet.

As to the Senate, where the climate bill will almost certainly weaken again, Nate Silver postulates that there are 62-66 potential votes for legislation, and Bill Scher sees some possibilities among the GOP as well. I'm significantly more skeptical, especially with the lack of mass grassroots action, which just has not materialized.

...There's now a tentative agreement on a more limited plan to not let global temperature rise above 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Degrees Of Seriousness

Democrats and liberals are wrestling with whether or not to pass the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, whether the arm-twisting by the Speaker of the House was too unseemly - in other words, the typical sturm und drang exhibited often on the left, the crisis of conscience, the Hamlet-like paralysis of analysis, the desperate attempt to do the right thing.

On the right, they just lie about the bill and try to turn the side-work of a crank into a scandal worthy of a -gate suffix:

Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn't conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming. The story has sparked explosive claims, on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, that the EPA censored scientific data for political reasons. And Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for an outright criminal investigation into the matter.

But it's hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it's more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time. In fact, a NASA climatologist has called the report -- whose existence was first publicized last week by the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) -- "a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at."

I'm not saying that liberals should learn something from the "Big Lie" tactics of the right. But clearly when you have one responsible party and one who doesn't care about the truth, the latter will sound clearer, more direct and more palatable to the uninformed. It's just easier not to be serious about any of this.

CA-45: Bono Mack Being Hunted

Mary Bono Mack has in her career adeptly threaded the needle, voting mostly with the right but surprising on just enough bills every year to appear moderate to her district, which went for Barack Obama in 2008 and has a PVI of only R+3. But her yes vote on the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill has incensed conservatives, so much so that they are waging jihad against not only Bono Mack but her Congressman husband, who by the way voted against Waxman-Markey.

So it was probably a bit of a shock to her when she saw the headline above that I captured in a screen shot from the Republican Party blog, Red State: Mary Bono Mack Should Be Burned In Effigy And Voted out Of Office. It was written by Georgia Republican Party operative Erick Erickson and something tells me Erickson isn't about to endorse Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet, who's not just gay, but married (to another man) and happily raising their two children! Too far a stretch for Republicans who seem to always be involved with "opposite marriages," or whatever they call the degrading situations traditional marriage sanctity defenders like Mark Sanford, David Diapers Vitter, Larry Craig and John Ensign are in.

Erickson and the fringe loons on the furthest reaches of the non-criminal right are so upset with Bono Mack that they are threatening to not just defeat her but to go after the right-wing extremist husband to boot! He demands that she vote against health care reform and against the energy bill when it comes back from the Senate-- where it will probably be watered down and look more acceptable to mainstream conservatives!!!-- or face the consequences.

"Otherwise, we beat her and her husband at the polls.

Yes, you heard me. We can get at Mary Bono Mack in two ways-- her district and that of her husband. He should feel the heat just as much as her."

Now, Erickson is a silly person. And his frothing at the mouth is unlikely to result in any change in CA-45. However, I wonder if they can entice some far-right activist to run in the primary. Gary Jeandron, who lost to Manuel Perez convincingly in 2008, is supposedly preparing for a rematch. But AD-80 is far less cordial to Republicans than CA-45 is. And maybe enough foot-stomping tea partiers can persuade him - or some other teabagger - to challenge Bono Mack in the primary. As one of only 8 Republicans to vote for the Waxman-Markey bill (and one of them, John McHugh, is about to become Barack Obama's Secretary of the Army), the wingnuts don't have many targets. Bono Mack may have poked her head up on the wrong bill.

This could be a good time to check out Steve Pougnet.

Innovating Our Way Into Benefits From Energy Policy

We hear a lot about how legislation to mitigate the worst effects of climate change will cost a bundle. And to be sure, it does SOUND like transferring to a new energy economy would require a period of adjustment, and the costs would get passed onto the customer. But the CBO study of the Waxman-Markey bill specifically showed those costs to be miniscule, the price of a postage stamp per day. And David Roberts says that, when you factor in all the savings of the bill, Americans will come out ahead:

Cost-effective low-carbon alternatives are plentiful. Many remain unexploited not because they can’t compete in a free market, but because there isn’t one. A variety of market barriers, market failures, and behavioral failures plague the energy sector: monopolies, oligarchs, myopic accounting, misaligned incentives, perverse regulation, information bottlenecks, immature business models, cultural inertia, plain old bad habits. Underutilization of cost-effective clean alternatives is especially true in efficiency. (See: McKinsey & ACEEE.) Hell, recycled waste heat alone could generate 742 terawatt hours of power a year in the U.S., according to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (PDF).

Market failures can be overcome through smart legislation, regulation, and investment designed to encourage not just alternative technologies but alternative systems. When we get our accounting right, we see they’re all over. The era of cheap energy in the U.S. has produced, among other things, a relatively sclerotic and unimaginative energy sector, particularly in electricity, which is dominated by monopolies. (The average power plant is no more efficient today than it was 50 years ago.)

But that languid pace of innovation is changing, and quickly. The past or even present pace of energy innovation is no adequate predictor of the explosion on its way.

In addition to the avoidance of costs that would be due to climate change, observers underestimate the value of innovation and efficiency, particularly the latter, a key obsession of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Yesterday the White House announced a series of energy efficiency efforts which, if successful, will save millions of tons of carbon dioxide and gigawatts of power over the future. These things tend to snowball, as efficient lighting can beget even more efficient lighting, and efficient windows can beget even more efficient windows, etc. If we start building with efficiency in mind today, the savings in the future are really exponential. And the market has already been created for green building.

So I would rather talk about the benefits of climate change legislation than the costs, because over the long run, the benefits will more clearly show themselves.

The Hopeful Sadness On Cap And Trade Legislation

After a spirited tussle in the House, climate and energy legislation moves to the Senate, where the chances are frankly much less foreordained than even the House.

As Grist reported earlier this week, environmental groups are already working to secure improvements in the Senate.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, issued a statement congratulating House leaders for the landmark passage. Boxer has pledged to have her own climate bill, likely based on Waxman-Markey, passed out of committee in August [...]

Senate Democrats’ last attempt to pass a climate bill failed by a large margin in June 2008, and senators have already rejected an attempt to exempt the climate bill from being filibustered. It takes 60 votes to end debate on legislation in the Senate; Democrats hold 59 seats in the Senate (60 if you count Al Franken, of course). But a number of Midwestern and Southern Democrats have expressed concerns about passing the legislation, and few observers expect more than two or three GOP lawmakers to vote for a climate bill.

Meanwhile, the energy bill approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week was significantly weaker than provisions in Waxman-Markey. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said he wants every committee in the Senate to complete work on climate and energy legislation by mid-September, so there is still a good deal of time left to shape legislation before the Senate adjourns for the year in November or December.

The lack of outside grassroots energy for this already-weakened bill means that all the compromises move the bill to the right, and at some point, the fragile coalition supporting it will break when liberals finally say "Enough!" While where House members voted depended in large part on whether their district favored Obama, in the less accountable Senate that dynamic will not be nearly as widespread. Right now, this bill looks doomed to crash on the rocks in the stream accompanying Claire McCaskill's Twitter feed.

I wouldn't call the 212 who voted against Waxman-Markey traitors, but political animals who don't see the politics well-aligned on cap and trade, and fear retribution at the polls. I think it's wrong for the President to use those calculations to absolve them of their votes, but the reality is that progressives haven't sealed the debate in the country to any real extent. I doubt that Republicans can make this an election issue like with the BTU tax in 1993, and the right-wing tea partiers trying to string up the 8 Republicans who voted for the bill are sure to fall flat. But the mandate for action is clearly not warming as quickly as the planet.

One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is “but it was warmer in the late 90s.” In fact, the odds are good that I’ll get that argument from George Will on This Weak tomorrow. I basically know the answer: temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That’s why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.

So here’s average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.



What this tells me is that annual temperature is indeed noisy: there have been many large fluctuations, indeed much larger than the up-and-down in the last decade or so. But the direction of change is unmistakable if you take the longer view. The fitted line in the figure is a 3rd-degree polynomial, but any sort of smoothing would tell you that there is a massive upward trend.

I continue to maintain that, in the end, we will have to innovate and adapt our way out of the climate crisis rather than legislate our way out of it. That doesn't mean we forget about pushing for strong policies to save the planet, just an expression of reality.

ACES High

The Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act narrowly passed today by a vote of 219-212. Roll call here. Eight Republicans voted for it, 44 Democrats voted against.

Anyone who understands the dynamic of the House being to the left of the Senate knows that this bill, already compromised beyond belief, has little chance of being strengthened in the upper chamber, regardless of what enviro groups are saying. To wit:

But Pelosi and Waxman’s work is far from over. The Waxman-Markey bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

Despite a push from Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to follow the House’s lead, most of the Senate’s climate change work has thus far been conducted by Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).

Bingaman’s bill lacks a cap-and-trade provision, focuses more on increased domestic production, and generally goes in a wholly different direction than the Waxman-Markey bill.

So we'll probably have to rely on that conference committee again. I'm not seeing that likely to work, given these thin numbers in the House.

I think the chances of final passage on something like this bill are still only 30-70. The Senate will be a rough, rough road.

...more at the Speaker's blog.

Waxman-Markey Showdown Today

The key for me on the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill, which may or may not pass the House today (actually, my money's on pass), was always whether or not it gets the ball rolling on renewables, efficiency and emission reduction. I don't think we'll ever have the sufficient political will to do what's necessary based on the science - there are just too many variables and regional obstacles - and so we'll need to adapt and innovate our way out of this mess. Time Magazine has a pretty good pieceon those political obstacles.

If Nancy Pelosi gets her way by the end of the week, the U.S. House of Representatives will have passed landmark global-warming legislation. But you might not know it from the near unanimously bad reviews so many different interested parties are giving it. Groups as disparate as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Farm Bureau, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers have expressed either strong concerns or outright opposition to the bill.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Global warming has long been a Democratic priority — and with House Speaker Pelosi and President Barack Obama behind it, many didn't think Democrats would have had such a hard time reaching a consensus on legislation. But getting enough rural and moderate Democrats to sign on was no easy task; the final (some would say watered down) deal is a hard-won, middle-of-the-road bill that is still likely to lose Democratic votes from both the right and the left, though it may gain some moderate Republicans.

Al Gore thinks this bill does provide a decent start and sets the table for the Copenhagen talks in December; others disagree. There are warnings that the bill would allow companies to move overseas for their fuel, expanding our trade deficit and cutting jobs. There's just as reasonable a theory that the renewable and efficiency targets in the bill would create lots of jobs here in America, manufacturing jobs in parts and supplies for the new energy economy.

It really is a toss-up to me. The President has done some really bad environmental things in the courts, but he appears to genuinely want this bill to pass. I think Digby gets the politics right - a loss here in the House would mean nothing more for a couple years, and would stall the momentum for the more progressive elements of the Obama agenda. Regardless of what passes today, the fight goes on for those who want to see the planet protected and a new economy bloom.

Looking Beyond Waxman-Markey, Because Looking At It Is Too Ugly

By now you probably know that the Waxman-Markey climate bill will hit the floor of the House tomorrow. This has become almost a stealth issue in America, which is astounding. The President stressed his support of the bill at his press conference Tuesday and nobody asked a question about it. Today he's whipping support publicly and calling lawmakers privately, accusing Republicans of spreading misinformation and casting the bill as a "jobs bill," always a good maneuver in an age of double-digit unemployment. Yet it's not a front-and-center issue in most people's minds. An ABC poll showed support of the bill if it raised electric rates by $10 a month, and opposition if it raised them $25 a month.

And yet this is a world-historical vote, which seeks to address one of the foundational issues of our time - the fact that a runaway climate has the potential to make large sections of the world uninhabitable, cause mass death, and require disruptive adaptation costing in the trillions of dollars. So $15 a month swings support one way or the other? And nobody, not even the President, can get it on the front page?

Keep in mind that the bill, as currently constructed, is not even sufficient to the task. The energy efficiency aspects of the bill are sound - so sound that this EPA analysis, stating that Waxman-Markey would result in less renewable energy than in a status quo ante environment, is mainly because the efficiency targets are so strong that they would significantly reduce the amount of electricity required. But the other part of that reflects the inadequacies of the bill:

The bill also won’t sufficiently drive up the price of dirty fossil fuels to encourage a big switch to renewables, the analysis says. (Here’s how that sounds in untranslated EPA-speak: “Allowances prices are not high enough to drive a significant amount of additional low or zero-carbon energy . . . in the shorter term.”)

Enviro groups, which have misplayed this debate dramatically, don't want to upset the precarious balance that has allowed the bill to progress this far by strengthening it with amendments. And so we're stuck with a bill that has an insufficient carbon emissions cap, gives away scads of allowances to polluters and farm interests, maintains the ethanol scam, does too little on the renewable energy standard, doesn't invest enough in clean sources of energy and fails to advance the ball to a significant degree. Ed Markey says that this is the political reality of getting a bill like this to pass. And at Grist, Dave Roberts tries to look on the bright side:

Anyway, on odd-numbered days, I think I’ve reached a fragile zen detente with the whole process. Mainly, I’ve been trying to focus on a different question: will there be an energy revolution? After all, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is not the only shot for Obama to make good on his campaign promises on energy. Nor is the legislation our last chance to tackle the climate crisis. No bill can carry that kind of weight, not at this moment, with this Congress. America is at the tail end of an era of cheap energy and heedless economic growth. Waxman-Markey is just the struggle to get an extremely hidebound, backward-looking set of political institutions to acknowledge that the old order is collapsing. Building a new order is something else entirely.

The question is, what’s going to happen after the bill is passed? An energy revolution will require a combination of social, technological, business, legal, regulatory, and legislative changes. Federal legislation can’t do all the lifting. Conversely, other changes can compensate somewhat for a weak (at least at the outset) federal framework. What will ultimately make the difference is not the specific mechanics of the bill but the, ahem, Sweep of History. (And who better to capture the Sweep of History than Some Blogger?)

I am reasonably optimistic, despite the flaws in Waxman-Markey, that history is on our side, and that the arguments happening today in Congress will soon be seen as peculiar and archaic.

Read the whole thing.

That's a good way of denying the present, by painting a rosy, hopeful outlook for the future. And his analysis isn't far wrong. But it does nothing for the political realty today. And that reality shows that climate change is just not yet a "touch and feel" issue for enough Americans to make a dent in the political debate. And that we have a better chance finding disruptive technologies that blow the clean energy space wide open than waiting for some Congressman who has a coal mine in his district to come around to realize the scope of the problem. I hope Roberts is right about the future, because I'm not sure the politics will advance too much from the present.

...I agree that this is a good way of looking at it:

As we see a lot of big, landmark style bills coming to the floor in the coming months and stress out over whether they are "good" or "bad," failure or success, and instead look at legislating over the longer term as a process of constantly pushing toward better policy. Obviously, congress' institutional structure -- it's very hard to pass anything substantial or with any kind of speed -- creates an incentive geared towards achieving huge breakthroughs, since you may only get this chance -- and this majority -- once...But there's no law saying that Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats can't take another bite at the health care apple -- or energy, or financial regulations, or whatever -- after the mid-terms or, hell, as soon as the first bill passes.

One quibble, which I will explore in my next post.

Welcome to 2007

The Blue Dogs and the Energy and Commerce Committee have finally reached agreement on an energy and climate bill, says Jay Newton-Small:

Ending a turf war, Waxman – whose committee has jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency -- allowed the Agriculture Department, not the EPA, to oversee a potentially lucrative program of energy offsets for farmers (Peterson allowed that the Obama Administration could weigh in on the EPA's role in the issue, if any). And Waxman agreed to bar the EPA for five years from calculating how much greenhouse gas emissions are generated when forests are converted to crop fields for ethanol and biofuels. The move helps get ethanol and biofuels counted as renewable energies, thus benefiting from a big renewable investment in another part of the bill that aims to see 20% of U.S. energy derived from green sources by 2025.

When asked Peterson said he believed the bill would enjoy “broad support” and even “draw a few Republicans.” Peterson's changes will be added as an amendment when the 900+ page bill reaches the House floor Friday.

I know that Waxman has throughout this process focused on the cap, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and he's been willing to bargain around the edges to bring that cap into reality. But these are really abominable changes. For example, by enabling farm-state Dems through holding off the calculation of biofuel land use in emissions, Waxman keeps in place the failed structure of corn-based ethanol, which takes up more energy to produce than it saves. And keep in mind that the bill out of the House is likely to be BETTER than the craptastic bill that will emerge from the Senate.

This sounds like something the Democrats would do two years ago, when they held the House and would go through compromise after compromise to get something through on an agenda item, only to see the Senate do nothing with it. What's the point?

The EPA had a good analysis of the consumer implications of the bill (it would probably lower electricity costs for most people), and the energy efficiency standards are still pretty good. But at some point, "revolutionary in its intent" just doesn't cut it. And even Podesta, in the previous link, admits the Senate bill is unacceptable. Some advocacy groups like the League of Conservation Voters are going to the mattresses, saying that "In light of the tremendous importance of this legislation, LCV has made the unprecedented decision that we will not endorse any member of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election cycle who votes against final passage of this historic bill. "

Is the bill historic? I guess, but it won't come close to doing what is needed, and furthermore the pressure needs to be exerted in the Senate. Combine the sketchy work from the enviro groups, the endless willingness to compromise from liberals, the plain old avarice from Blue Dogs and farm-state Democrats, and the sloth of the Senate, and you have a bill that won't do what's necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. We'll be switching to an adaptation strategy - climate-controlled plastic bubbles for everyone - within half a decade.

Waxman-Markey Off The Gurney, Onto The Floor

All of a sudden, we're going to have the Waxman-Markey bill on the floor of the US House, as early as Friday, even as negotiations continue with rural Dems who want to keep extracting whatever they can from the bill. It's a very odd moment, considering that the bill was literally called "dead" over the weekend.

The speaker filed the legislation with the Rules Committee on Monday night, her spokesman said, even though its authors, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, are still working out a deal with Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson.

"The bill has been filed tonight with the Rules Committee," Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in an e-mail. "There are some issues still under discussion, but we are confident we can resolve them by the time the bill goes to the floor on Friday."

The speaker, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Waxman and Peterson "have all agreed on this approach for moving this historic climate change and clean energy jobs bill," Hammill continued.

The Hill speculates on whether it has the votes. I suppose the surprise vote has its merits, in that the opposition is diffuse and unready for a major fight. Then again, the allies of this bill, environmentalists, are at odds over whether it makes sense to pass at all:

Some believe the bill is so deeply flawed it might actually make matters worse; disillusionment with the bill is causing fierce recriminations within the environmental movement and has led to a knockdown, drag-out fight within the Sierra Club.

“This situation represents much more than just a normal legislative fight,” says former Sierra Club president Larry Fahn, who as a current board member has argued that the bill has been watered down to the point of being unsalvageable. “It’s about the core of what we’re now fighting for, and who we are.” [...]

Many environmentalists blame Waxman-Markey’s flaws on the United States Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP), a coalition of industry and moderate environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council that, during the last years of the Bush administration, quietly hammered out what has become the bill’s framework. Sierra Club board member M.K. Dorsey, a professor of global environmental policy at Dartmouth, calls the environmentalists in US-CAP “well-meaning liberals who do not pay enough attention to political economy.” He adds: “They got out-maneuvered, they got hoodwinked, because they were in over their head.”

US-CAP’s approach hasn’t shifted along with the political climate in Washington, says Michelle Chan, a program director with Friends of the Earth (FoE), a left-of-center environmental group. Given that US-CAP’s environmental members “signed a deal in blood” with companies such as Shell and Duke Energy before the election, “the new politics of Obama never played out in this scenario,” she says. “So the deal doesn't move the ball forward now. We're stuck.”

Other enviros disagree. “I absolutely do not know what people are smoking when they argue that the political climate is different now,” counters Manik Roy, vice president for federal government outreach at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a founding member of US-CAP. “We have huge parts of this country that generate electricity from coal, and that are very dependent on manufacturing—none of that has changed.” Nor has the American public’s willingness to overcome those interests, he adds. “Poll after poll is showing that we don’t have a critical mass in this country who are concerned about the urgency of climate change. Until that changes, I think this bill is truly the best we can get in this economic environment.”

I'm not sure where I fall on this argument, and it seems amazing to me that the bill will hit the floor while that conversation plays out. Of course, passing the House and getting to the President's desk are two different things, and even if this gets through the House, it will probably sit on a shelf for a while as the Senate deals with health care.

I don't really have a good recommendation on how to handle this: Waxman-Markey is the only game in town, yet it is certainly flawed in many key respects.

When CBO Scores Vanish

When a partial Congressional Budget Office score revealed that health care would be more expensive than expected and not cover as many Americans, mainly because it was scoring something, you know, PARTIAL, the press had a field day, egged on by Republicans. Hell, they're still talking about it.

"Meet the Press" has really got to step up its game on the health-care debate. Last week, host David Gregory tweeted "Compelling fact today: dem-wh health care plan would only cover 16 of the 50 mill uninsured. That makes it a harder sell. Info from cbo." Problem was, his fact wasn't much of a fact. CBO didn't score a "Dem-White House" plan. It scored a partial version of the Senate HELP Committee's plan. The White House wasn't involved. And nor, for that matter, would that plan have only covered 16 million. The version of the bill examined by CBO was missing the employer mandate and the specifics on the individual mandate. It was missing, in other words, the parts of the bill that would cover people. Gregory was right to say that the CBO score was a setback. But not for the reasons he suggested.

By contrast, over the weekend, that same CBO scored the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill to determine the annual cost per household of a cap and trade system and a renewable energy standard.

On that basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change. CBO could not determine the incidence of certain pieces (including both costs and benefits) that represent, on net, about 8 percent of the total. For the remaining portion of the net cost, households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of $245.

In other words, in another partial score, since it doesn't take into account the benefit of mitigating climate change, low income households would actually benefit slightly from the impacts of the bill, while high-income households would see a fairly nominal cost. Republicans have argued for months that doing anything on greenhouse gas emissions would cost anywhere from $1,600 to $3,100 a family.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this score will have absolutely no impact on the debate over whether or not we should enact climate and energy legislation. Those who want to cover for polluting industries will still lie that the impact on "working families" will be too costly, and the press will "cover the controversy." In other words, the CBO only matters when it matters.

Meanwhile, Democrats have, apparently, a global warming denier in charge of the House Agriculture Committee, and he's doing whatever he can to stop the bill.

House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) on Friday said climate change bill negotiators are heading back to the drawing board after discussions between Democrats “blew up last night.”

A meeting between chairmen drafting the climate bill and Democrats on the Agriculture Committee “by and large blew up last night” over the issue of offsets, Peterson said.

Specifically, he said, Agriculture Democrats rejected a concept pitched by bill drafters that would set money aside for a new greenhouse gas conservation program tied together with some offsets [...]

“We’re back to how do we deal — we want USDA to run our offset program; they want EPA to run it,” Peterson said. “Not that we’re necessarily against the EPA; they just speak a different language. They don’t have the infrastructure out there to deal with us.”

Added Peterson, “I’m tired of this running around in circles.”

Funny, I was about to say the same thing.

I'm beginning to think that humans have a better chance of adapting with gills than adapting legislatively with meaningful climate change legislation. After all, lawmakers have to protect those poor families from getting that $40 in ten years.

A Lazy Species

The White House is about to get more involved in the push for a climate and energy bill, and not a moment too soon. It's really dying on the vine.

The Obama administration will make an intense push to pass climate and energy legislation next week, according to key lawmakers, aides and lobbyists.

The “energy week” comes as the House faces new obstacles to passing a controversial cap-and-trade bill, causing environmentalists to grumble that the White House has not put enough political capital into passing comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year.

The White House plans to dispatch Cabinet officials to push the administration’s energy agenda and urge Congress to pass climate legislation currently under siege from skeptical Democrats in the House.

Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman is engaging in intense negotiations with rural and fiscally conservative Democrats, who have raised a series of problems with the legislation. He’d like the full House to vote on the bill next week, timing that would coincide with the White House push.

“We’re very close to an agreement,” Waxman said Wednesday. “I want us to see if we can get it on the floor next week.”

Some would say that, with health care reform faltering, we don't need this additional distraction. But it's not like we can hold off on doing something to mitigate climate change. This MIT report came out a few weeks ago to crickets:

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that.

The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. [...]

Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, says that, regarding global warming, it is important "to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science," he says. And in the peer-reviewed literature, the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems. "In that sense, our work is unique," he says.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. [...]

"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback "is just going to make it worse," Prinn says.

I mean, good God. And it doesn't even appear that the advocacy groups want to get started and pass something like Waxman-Markey immediately. Indeed, before this White House bailout, practically nobody was even talking about it or working hard to pass it. I get a few emails here and there about clean energy, but nobody defines terms.

Maybe the reason that it seems like Obama has lost all his political capital is that he has to use it up for every little thing. But on this particular issue, climate change, I just think it's the boiling frog issue writ large. We cannot touch and feel the climate changing on a daily basis, we don't see the terrible consequences except in scientific papers, and we just go about our day - what's more, we're HAPPY when it's sunny out.

I just don't know what to do about this. Most political systems, least of all ours, have no ability to be proactive. The Administration does have two things going for it - the ruling allowing the EPA to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act (which the Waxman-Markey bill apparently NULLIFIES), and the December meetings in Copenhagen, a kind of deadline for the Administration to put something in place they can show the world. The rest is a mess.