On Inauguration Day 2007, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for a "new America that is strong, secure, and a respected leader among the community of nations."
"A new America that declares our energy independence, promotes domestic sources of renewable energy, and combats climate change" was her charge. Pelosi said these words on January 4 on the House floor. It was 65 degrees outside.
The temperature that day may not be all that significant -- just another unusually warm afternoon during the latest in a series of unusually warm years and unusually warm winters. (December 2006 was the first in at least 129 years in which Manhattan -- and much of the eastern seaboard -- saw no snow.) But it was probably more than that. This was, after all, another El Niño season -- one replete with sufficiently bizarre weather phenomena that, to an unprecedented extent, the earth's climate became the subject of international concern.
On January 17, the same day Nancy Pelosi announced the creation of a special climate change committee in the House, for the first time in 45 years, it snowed in Malibu, California, as well as at Los Angeles International Airport. The next day, BBC reported that more than 20 people had been killed in Europe as the result of hurricane-force storms. Meanwhile, Russia, accustomed to winters well below freezing, became so warm that the bears at St. Petersburg zoo emerged from hibernation weeks earlier than expected.
Even the agents of commerce couldn't ignore what was happening in their cities. Eager to have a say in what they believe is an inevitable new carbon-emissions regime, on January 22, executives from Alcoa, BP America, DuPont, Caterpillar, General Electric, Duke Energy, Lehman Brothers, and PG&E urged President Bush in a letter to "take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide, market-driven approach to climate change."
The president responded as one might expect -- not by reversing his rejectionist stance on significant, effective carbon reduction policies, but rather by highlighting recent research on a new global warming solution. This solution hinges upon launching giant sun-reflecting mirrors into space and pumping soot into the atmosphere to create what would amount to a nuclear winter without the explosions or radioactive fallout.
That research was passed along to the 2000 scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well. For a global organization that receives as much input from oleaginous experts in America and Saudi Arabia as it does from greener officials in Denmark and Norway, their conclusions this year were startlingly blunt: Global warming is real, it is anthropogenic, it is driving heat waves and tropical storms, and it will continue until it is redressed.
Is there a connection to be drawn between the reality of global warming and the wackiness of this past winter? Kevin Trenberth, a respected scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has pioneered the research on the murky connection between El Niño and global warming, and, in his view, as goes the latter, so goes the former. He expects that winters like this past one will only become more common.
Trenberth testified on precisely this connection before the new Congress in February. The new Congress, it turns out, is in a hurry to do something about global warming, or at least to appear to be doing something about it. But is fully aware that the solutions will be much harder to push forward than, say, a boost in the minimum wage, or even ethics reform. In fact, it just might require waiting until a new president takes the oath of office.
---
The obstacles to comprehensive climate change legislation are different in the House than they are in the Senate and different in both bodies from perhaps the biggest obstacles: industry inertia and presidential intransigence.
To date, no legislator has suggested a policy that enjoys unanimous agreement among experts. Right now, for instance, the strongest bills in Congress are all cap-and-trade bills. These set a ceiling on the total tonnage of global warming pollutants that American entities can emit every year, and enforce that limit by distributing or -- in the case of John Edwards' new proposal -- selling allowances to industries. Then, they lower those quotas year by year until the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is sustainable. But Al Gore, in his testimony before subcommittees in Congress last week, said that he believes current concentrations of atmospheric carbon are already too high. He endorses a combination of a cap-and-trade system with a revenue-neutral plan that would swap payroll tax revenue with a tax on major carbon emitters. That plan is what people like Trenberth would like to see. "I favor a carbon tax myself," he told me. "Mitigation is very much needed and the right incentives may make wonders happen."
As for the legislative terrain, the House, with simpler rules than the Senate and a thin but decisive Democratic majority, will have no problem passing a significant climate bill. Pelosi is even on the record saying that she'd like to see the House introduce greenhouse effect-mitigating legislation by Independence Day. The problem is that the bill will ultimately be written in large part by fifty-year House veteran John Dingell of Michigan. Dingell, now chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, has spent his career protecting the auto industry from government regulation.
In a widely covered move, Pelosi, attempting to offset any weaknesses Dingell might write into the final package, created a special committee, to be chaired by Edward Markey of Massachusetts, that will advise the House on climate change matters. But like most special committees in Washington, it will have no actual authority of its own. Dingell reacted to the announcement as one might expect the House's eldest elder to react: First by insulting the special committee, calling it "dumb" and as relevant as "feathers on a fish," then by sending Pelosi a letter welcoming the committee, but highlighting its institutional impotence:
"We are pleased," Dingell wrote, "that we have been able to successfully resolve questions concerning the authorities and responsibilities of the proposed select committee on climate change and energy."
He went on, "The resolution creating the select committee will specify that as has been your intent, the select committee is not a committee with legislative authority & Legislative committees of jurisdiction should have the primary call on witnesses where there is a potential conflict."
Not that the situation is hopeless. Dingell will work on the legislation with Henry Waxman, who as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee has equal say in whatever bill moves forward. Waxman's own Safe Climate Act, recently reintroduced, is a serious cap-and-trade bill. Its bottom line -- ultimately the most important element of any emissions-limiting legislation -- is to reduce, by the year 2050, greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from their 1990 levels. If he is reasonably rigid on those terms, he might move Dingell in the right direction after all. (Dingell, it should be noted, was a gracious host to Al Gore during his House testimony. Gore made the sound point that increasing fuel efficiency standards might actually help the bleeding American auto industry.) Meanwhile, House aides have told me that one of Markey's main tasks as head of the special committee will be to relentlessly hammer the Bush administration in public hearings about the importance of a comprehensive cap-and-trade system -- which the president now vocally opposes -- as well as the massive problems with the voluntary policies included in the Clear Skies Act.
In the Senate, the situation is much different, and in many ways trickier. Under Republican rule, House leadership gagged any potential progress on climate and environmental issues, which has given the Senate a several-years head start. Awaiting action in various committees are one weak bill -- sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico -- and at least three major packages of significant reform written by three different pairs of recognizable senators: John McCain and Joe Lieberman have cosponsored one mammoth bill, John Kerry and Olympia Snowe of Maine another, and liberal titans Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer have the most stringent offering.
All of the bills operate as cap-and-trade policies and none involve a carbon tax. Nor do any of them provide for the creation of a major government program -- modeled on the Manhattan Project -- devoted to researching the technological developments, large and small, that will be necessary. That's because neither of those options is yet considered politically achievable.
These bills currently being hurried into the mix would essentially enact the solution put forth by pragmatists like the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a sizable contingent of scientists, environmentalists, and industry representatives seeking to shape environmental law. The USCAP model rests on the consensus that, in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, atmospheric carbon levels must be stabilized at a 450-550 parts-per-million (ppm) concentration range.
"Sanders-Boxer is the gold standard," said Daniel Lashof, a senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council, a major environmental non-profit and a USCAP member organization. By calling, like Waxman's bill, for an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emission from 1990 levels, the Sanders-Boxer bill would stabilize global atmospheric carbon concentrations at the safer end of the recommended range -- if, of course, China and India institute major, Kyoto-sized reforms of their own.
Lashof doesn't denigrate the weaker McCain-Lieberman bill, calling it "pretty good in terms of its scope," while cautioning that it "includes unnecessary and counterproductive incentives for nuclear power." But simply by reading the bills side by side, it's apparent that McCain and Lieberman are aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as little as possible while still meeting the benchmarks set forth by experts. An aide to Senator Lieberman confirmed that. "USCAP recommends a [greenhouse gas concentration] range of 450-550 ppm," the aide said. "Our bill comes in at the lower end of that. Boxer-Sanders is on the higher, or more stringent end of that. We're looking at moderate Republicans and coal state Democrats. If they're going to vote in favor of something, then they want the scientific community to say it solves the problem but is on the industry-friendly end of what is required."
Kerry's staff did not respond to repeated inquiries about his proposal, which works comparably to both bills. It's less explicit than McCain-Lieberman is on the precise mechanisms that will govern the cap-and-trade system it envisions, and less strict about emissions reductions per se than the Boxer-Sanders version, but still would bring concentrations down to 450 ppm. The Lieberman aide put it this way: "I think the main way in which they're different is that McCain-Lieberman focuses its energy on the structure of the cap-and-trade system with a fair amount of detail. There's quite a lot of certainty about how the system will work and who will administer it. It lays out the cost control mechanisms, like borrowing offsets and trading. The Kerry-Snowe bill is less detailed on how a cap-and-trade system will work. Instead it deals with supplementary regulatory systems."
Lieberman's bill establishes something called a "Climate Change Credit Corporation" that will oversee the distribution and trade of carbon allowances, while other bills leave that oversight in the hands of existing government agencies. But it's not clear why a separate mechanism matters more than bottom-line impact; on that score, the McCain-Lieberman bill falls short of its competition. But that may be why it's the model for whatever bill makes its way to the president's desk.
In July 2005, the McCain-Lieberman bill garnered 38 votes. In 2007, it, along with any of its cousins, will almost certainly need 60 simply to make it to the White House. That leaves Senate leadership and the Committee on the Environment and Public Works with three options. They can advance Bingaman's bill -- which comes nowhere near the mark -- and, as environmentalists fear, risk allowing the issue to stagnate for another dozen years. (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid opposes Bingaman's bill because, as an aide told me, the environmentalists' fears about it are perfectly well-founded.) They can settle on a comprehensive bill that cobbles together elements from all three of the other bills, and push it and push it until the 60 votes manifest themselves. Or they can wait until the 111th Congress, when the alignment of the Senate and the new president are perhaps friendlier to sweeping reforms. A Democratic aide who knows the trajectory of energy and environmental issues in the Senate told me it could go either way between the second and third options.
With the Senate as closely divided as it is, McCain-Leiberman's weaknesses may be what ultimately propel its substance forward. It currently has nine cosponsors, including, if you count McCain himself, three Republicans. More are necessary to beat a filibuster. (Though Barbara Boxer chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, her bill is widely opposed by Republicans; its 11 cosponsors are all progressive Democrats.)
A House aide told me that the two bodies are working closely together, and, if Reid and Pelosi leverage their considerable weight, both chambers might ultimately introduce very similar bills. That much, though, is still high up in the air.
---
That is the legislative terrain. But the question remains, is it wise to do legislative battle with the Congress you have, or with the Congress -- and perhaps the president -- you might wish to have in two years? The answer to that question hinges on the urgency of the crisis and the costs of waiting.
Lashof told me that "Congress should pass the best bill that they can pass, put the bill on [Bush's] desk and see what he does with it & challenge him to sign it." He says, "the goal is to try to move as quickly as possible & preferably by summer." Indeed, the party's strategy should be to relentlesssly peck away at the obstacles between themselves and success -- with repeated votes (beginning with this Congress), hearings, and any other actions that make what's most urgent seem most salient -- until, over time, those obstacles fall away like rotten timber. That strategy has been, and will be, enormously frustrating. But the upside of attacking the problem repeatedly will be that, even if progress must await the 111th Congress anyhow, nobody will be able to accuse climate-change leaders in Congress of not taking the issue seriously.