Going For Broke On Climate Change

David Roberts

February 06, 2007

David Roberts is a staff writer at Grist and contributes frequently to their blog, Gristmill.

It's 2009. Democratic majorities have expanded in the House and become filibuster-proof in the Senate. Astride the executive branch stands the only American ever to win a Nobel Peace Price prior to being elected president: Al Gore. The star of 2006's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" is known the world over as a prophet on the subject of global warming. (Vice President Barack Obama boasts merely a Grammy.)

Gore and Obama won the race with a simple two-part message. They promised to draw down American forces from Iraq and Iran and leave behind no permanent bases. And they promised New Strength: a domestic renewal program driven by investment in clean energy infrastructure, a stiff tax on carbon, and a national crash program of energy efficiency and conservation.

Fantasy? Not any more, not completely. It is a measure of the tectonic changes in recent American politics that this scenario recently drifted out of the Fantastical and into the Merely Improbable.

Since 2000, federal climate-change politics have been binary: support the Bush administration's inaction, or oppose it. Now, in the blink of an eye, they've fragmented. Legislation is springing up like fungus. Constituencies are realigning, with conservative evangelicals rubbing shoulders with dirty hippies and security hawks. And as of early last Friday morning, the debate over the existence of anthropogenic climate change was dealt its death blow.

The coup de grace was administered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the form of a summary for policy makers of its latest report. That report—the IPCC's fourth in 17 years—is a painstaking assessment of the state of human knowledge of climate change, drawing on the work of some 2,500 scientists from more than 100 countries. And it is unequivocal: The climate is heating, human beings are causing it, and possible consequences range from unpleasant to catastrophic.

The bright line is a national cap on carbon emissions, and not for the mere love of nature. Backers want to get ahead of the curve and help shape what they now view as inevitable legislation. Bush is trying too, in his own ham-fisted way. In his recent State of the Union address, he noted begrudgingly that his energy plan would "confront the serious challenge of global climate change." Never mind that it wouldn't—at least rhetorically, he's turned the corner.

In the Senate, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., newly installed head of the Senate Environment And Public Works Committee, will introduce  climate change legislation by the end of the year. The weakest bill being offered—naturally the one identified as closest to the "center" and most likely to pass—is from Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. It would establish the lukewarm goal of stabilizing industry emissions at 2013 levels by 2020, and institute an emissions cap-and-trade system to get there, complete with "safety valves" in case execs get tetchy. The other leading contender is a similar but somewhat stronger bill from Lieberman/McCain/Obama—the self-proclaimed-centrist trifecta—which tosses in nuclear subsides for added Republican support. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., is pushing an array of more aggressive measures.

But only one Senate bill, the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, explicitly aims to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050. It was introduced in January by Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in honor of his predecessor, James Jeffords, I-Vt., who first introduced it last session. It is co-sponsored by Boxer, who calls it the "gold standard."

Its corollary in the House is Henry Waxman's, D-Calif., Safe Climate Act, which boasts Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a co-sponsor. Pelosi knows as well as Boxer that as long as Bush holds the veto pen, such strong measures have a snowball's chance in hell. But she's still adamant about pushing climate legislation forward, and her time frame is more ambitious than Boxer's: She wants a bill passed out of the House by July 4—and she's not afraid to throw her weight around to get it.

Faced with the foot-dragging of House Energy and Commerce Committee chair John Dingell, D-Mich., who represents Detroit's big automakers and has promised only endless hearings, Pelosi set up a special committee on climate change chaired by true believer Ed Markey, D-Mass. While the committee won't have legislative jurisdiction, it will have the power to call hearings and embarrass the hell out of Dingell, who is reportedly furious at the turf incursion. Just this weekend he parried by calling climate celebrity Al Gore to testify before a special joint hearing, an event likely to leave no TV camera behind.

All the buzz has, for the first time in decades, awakened greens to the possibility of fundamental change. But they should remember that the interests of the planet and the interests of the new congressional leadership are not entirely in alignment. Right now, the overriding political objective for Pelosi and Reid is to position the party favorably for the 2008 elections. That means Getting Things Done, passing a bill to show that they, unlike their Republican predecessors, take global warming seriously.

But a climate-change bill that can pass through today's Congress—much less avoid a Bush veto—will inevitably be feeble. Worse, it could lock the U.S. into a slow, bureaucratic response and dampen public pressure to act.

Meanwhile, the widening gyre of Bush's imperial misadventures in the Middle East is dragging his party into a swamp of public opprobrium, and no one in the remarkably weak Republican primary field for 2008 looks capable of reversing the descent.

The arc of history is bending in a green direction. Gore/Obama may be a daydream, but Democratic victories in Congress and the White House in 2008 are increasingly plausible. Waiting on that turn of events may be a gamble, but if the IPCC tells us anything, it's that we may not have many chances to get this right. Let's keep our powder dry.