ON THE NO-ENERGY BILL, 2

Four Ways to Kill a Climate Bill
Lee Wasserman, July 25, 2010 (NY Times)

"IF President Obama and Congress had announced that no financial reform legislation would pass unless Goldman Sachs agreed to the bill, we would conclude our leaders had been standing in the Washington sun too long. Yet when it came to addressing climate change, that is precisely the course the president and Congress took…[They wove] four coordinated threads into a shroud of inaction…"

[Thread No. 1: Climate is out; green jobs are in:] "…Carol Browner, the White House coordinator of energy and climate policy… told climate bill advocates that, given the polling, they should avoid talking about climate change and focus on green jobs and energy independence… [O]ur national comprehension of climate change continues to stagnate. Virtually the only public officials working to shape opinion on this over the past two years have been those committed to misrepresenting the science."

Just because legislation succumbed to electioneering is no reason to impugn then very important construct. (click to enlarge)

[Thread No. 2: Devising a bill for historic polluters, not the American people:] "...[T]he Beltway wisdom has been that it is impossible to pass a bill without the approval of historic polluters, particularly the utilities, which run coal-burning power plants, the nation’s single largest source of climate-changing pollution. The administration and Congress did their best to get the industry’s permission for new regulations. They proposed handing power companies hundreds of billions of dollars worth of allowances to pollute, additional billions to subsidize the development of technology to sequester carbon from coal-fired plants, and evisceration of federal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon…[But] it wasn’t enough."

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[Thread No. 3: A Rube Goldberg-policy construction:] "… Because Congress built a policy machine designed for special interests, most proposals were chockablock with policy contraptions impossible to even explain, much less put into effect. Provisions included pollution allowances for favored corporations, carbon credit-default swaps, complicated worldwide offset provisions…and loopholes to extend the life of the dirtiest coal plants… This rush to the trough was inevitable once President Obama ditched his plan to push a simple market-based bill that would have required polluters, rather than citizens, to pay for switching from fossil fuels to [New Energy]…"

[Thread No. 4: The public sits it out:] "…American history has few examples of presidents or Congresses upending entrenched interests without public pressure forcing their hand… Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge. Even the earth’s flagging ability to support life as we know it couldn’t stir a public outcry. The loudest voices insisted that leaders in Washington do nothing…They obliged."