Congress, Ready to Act on Climate Change
3 Sep, 2007 01:31 pm
I?m at lunch with a Washington lobbyist who has good news. ?It?s quite plausible that we can get a cap-and-trade bill through this Congress,? Nikki Roy says. Roy, who is formally known as Manik Roy, PhD., is director of congressional affairs for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. His job is to persuade Congress to pass serious legislation to regulate greenhouse gases, and he puts the odds of action this fall at about 50-50. ?It?s been an exciting summer,? he says.
What’s the basis for his optimism? Essentially, it’s the coming together of a group of Senate moderates to support a meaningful climate change bill—one that would bring emissions down by 60-80% by 2050–as well as signs from key Democratic committee leaders in the Hose that they are ready to do the same.
The challenge, as he explains it to me, has been to to devise a bill with the “environmental integrity” to win over liberals who favor strong action (think Sens. Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders) without scaring off moderates and conservatives (think Sens. John Warner or Lindsey Graham). What the moderates want is some mechanism to deal with economic problems, should they arise, as the price of energy increases.
To put it plainly, politicians want to be reassured that the deep, wrenching and inevitable changes brought about by the radical, albeit gradual, de-carbonization of America will not wreck the economy. Those are my words, not his.
If climate change legislation passes this fall, it will be because the enviros and key Senators have been laying the groundwork for years. Roy, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, singles out John McCain, who with Joe Lieberman introduced a strong bill to regulate greenhouse gases back n 2002. “On this issue, I have enormous admiration for him,” Roy says. The McCain-Lieberman bill won support from 44 senators a few years ago. You need 60 votes to close off Senate debate and pass a major bill.
That became more likely this summer when Warner, a Virginia Republican, joined with Lieberman to introduce a bill that would reduce emissions by 10% in 2020 and 70% in 2050—enough to win backing from environmentalists. You can read more about the bill on Pew’s website.
Warner could be the key to getting a bill out of the Senate Environment Committee, where Democrats hold only a one-vote edge. He comes from state where, it’s safe assume, there are strong, conflicting opinions about climate change; the commonwealth includes both coal mines and the coastline along the Chesapeake Bay. But he’s also a national security geek, and he has said that he’s worried that global warming could lead to environmental refugees and political instability.
Meanwhile, to deal with fears that carbon caps will damage the economy, four Senators—Republicans Warner and Lindsey Graham of South Caroline and Democrats Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (the land of oil & gas & Katrina) —introduced legislation that would aim to protect consumers and business from the potential costs of carbon regulation. (You can read their press release here.)
The four senators want to create something called a Carbon Market Efficiency Board, modeled on the Fed, to build some flexibility into the regulatory scheme. This board could ease up on an emissions cap if the economy is suffering, but only by lowering the cap in the future. In effect, it would give industry the freedom to pollute more now so long as it pollutes less later, once economy rebounds. The idea came out of research conducted at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. The Institute’s Director, Timothy Profeta, is a former Lieberman aide who recently testified in the Senate.
Yes, It all sounds very wonky but the key is that a bill is emerging that can win support both from environmental community and from conservatives like Warner and Lindsay Graham. Who would have expected that?
Corporate America and its lobbyists will have a lot to say about all this. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US CAP) now has more than 30 corporate members, along with big enviro groups like NRDC, Environmental Defense, World Resources Institute and Pew. Corporate members include GE, Wal-Mart, GM, Ford, DuPont, Duke Energy, Conoco Phillips and Lehman Bros.
Business can go a long way towards persuading Congress that a strong global warming bill won’t sink the economy…..and that doing nothing might.
Originally posted at http://www.marcgunther.com/
I think the terms of the whole debate need to be reconsidered, because the real issue is not whether or not g. w. is caused by nature or by humans -- the "mea culpa" factor -- but whether or not we can actually do anything about it that won't be worse than the perceived threat itself.
Sure, it looks very much like g. w. is the result of human activity over the last century and a half. If we want to blame ourselves we have good reason. But the mistakes of the past were made precisely because we were reacting to certain perceived problems and ignoring others, which is exactly what we may be doing now.
A drastic increase in the price of energy worldwide -- and the enormous pressures that would have on the most vulnerable among us on the planet, including not only the possibility that many now living on the margins could actually freeze and/or starve to death but also the huge rise in unemployment that would result -- would in itself be a major disaster, possibly of epic proportions.
Even if we were to somehow stop the production of greenhouse gases tomorrow, that would not bring back the melted glaciers - and the ones now melting would coninue to melt, meaning that the seas would continue to rise, regardless. Nothing we can do now can prevent some really drastic things from happening climatewise over the next 100 to 200 years. But an over-reaction to this perceived problem can indeed produce a man made disaster that we'd have to face in the immediate future.
The good news about g. w. is that it is a very slow, very gradual process that we can prepare for. There are a great many things we can do over the next 50 years, say, to relocate people, build dikes (the Dutch did it, why not the New Yorkers or the Florideans), etc. If certain parts of the world will become uninhabitable, others (such as large areas of Canada, Greenland, etc.) will move in the opposite direction.
The ONLY way to effectively bring down the level of greenhouse gases, and that will be a VERY slow process in any case, is to go whole hog with nuclear power and, eventually, breeder reactors. All sorts of people who would have never dreamed of advocating such a move are now considering it. And maybe it's possible that we could some day find a way to build such plants in a truly fail-safe manner (though breeder reactors have to be among the most dangerous ideas ever conceived). Is global warming really worth taking such an extreme risk?
Humankind has adapted in all sorts of ways to all sorts of environmental challenges and as I see it we have a very good chance of adapting to this one -- especially because it is coming at us with all the speed and alacrity of a Galapagos tortoise. It's huge -- but slow. We do have world enough and time to deal with it. We would NOT have world enough and time to deal with the sort of crisis that would be produced by a serious increase in the cost of energy. We are probably responsible for global warming. The lesson to be learned from that is: less hubris, less effort to bend mother nature to our will. More common sense, more of an effort to look ahead, calmly assess what we are faced with -- and deal with it.