Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

A: I’m gonna answer this important and complicated question “no” for four reasons:

1. Against all evidence, conservative Republicans have simply refused to budge on the climate issue (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“). They would rather destroy the climate than support government-led clean energy solutions. I don’t see that changing for at least several years.
2. Moderate Republicans are a vanishing breed — and this election is likely to boot at least half of the remaining ones out of Congress.
3. The most important thing is to get as strong a climate bill as is possible in 2009. The Dems are going to have to compromise just to satisfy their own moderates (see “Moderate Senate Dems build ‘Gang of 16′ to influence cap-and-trade bill“). Weakening the bill further to get more than a few token Republicans would gut the whole effort.
4. China either embraces serious action sometime relatively soon after we do or they don’t. If they do, then gutting the bill sometime after that would be far less likely. If they don’t, then it is inconceivable the political will to endure strong domestic climate action will last very far into the implementation phase (i.e. very far into the phase when carbon prices and/or regulations start to bite). Thus, we need to maximize the likelihood that China embraces serious action and that again means we need to make our bill as strong and credible as possible.

But wait, you say. If the bill isn’t bipartisan, won’t the Republicans just gut it once they assume power? That is typically a key political calculation: How much do you gut a bill now to avoid having it gutted in the future? But climate change isn’t like other legislation in part because other key countries either respond to us or they don’t (as noted) and because the climate keeps getting worse and worse.

Undoing or weakening a climate bill couldn’t happen until and unless Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. If we are going to make super optimistic assumptions whereby Obama wins and gets reelected — and if we aren’t going to make super-optimistic assumptions then we aren’t going to avoid catastrophic global warming ’cause, like, the deck is heavily stacked against us and we’ll need runner runner to make a winning hand — then the earliest that could happen is 2017.

While conservative deniers/inactivists may think nothing much is going to change over the next eight years, in fact, by 2017, it is highly likely that all hell will be breaking loose — literally. Indeed, recent studies in Nature and Science suggest we are probably going to get quite hot quite fast early in the 2010s, and the coming decade is poised to see faster temperature rise than any decade in recorded history (see “Climate Forecast: Hot — and then Very Hot” and “Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming“).

Thus, most likely, future presidents and future congresses will be strengthening any climate bill, much as the nations of the world progressively tightened the restrictions on ozone-depleting substances as more and more countries joined the effort and as the dire nature of the problem became clearer and clearer (see “Lest We Forget Montreal“).

The other wildcard, assuming again that Obama were to win, is that, on the one hand, he is running as a different kind of politician, one who reaches across the aisle to solve major problems facing the nation. But, on the other hand, Obama is running on a strong and comprehensive energy and climate plan (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan“) — a plan that one can hardly imagine more than a tiny number of Republicans embracing (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us“).

E&E Daily has a long article today, “Possible Democratic sweep raises stakes for ‘09 cap-and-trade debate” (subs. req’d), which makes many points germane to this issue, and I will excerpt it here:

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How little regard does Sen. McCain actually have for voters’ genuine concerns about nuclear safety and waste issues? Consider his remarks yesterday from Cedar Falls, Iowa:

“You know, the other night in the debate with Senator Obama, I said his eloquence is admirable, but pay attention to his words. We talk about offshore drilling and he said he would quote, consider, offshore drilling. We talked about nuclear power, well it has to be safe, environment, blah, blah, blah.“

(Hoots, hollers and applause.)

The safety of nuclear power is a “blah, blah, blah” issue? Nuclear waste is a “blah, blah, blah” issue? Heck, McCain himself opposes letting nuclear waste go through Phoenix! This would boggle the mind if we hadn’t heard so many other amazing things come out of McCain’s mouth (see The real, Luddite McCain: “The truly clean technologies don’t work”).

And no McCain rally would be complete without the mindless GOP fossil-fuel chant:

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Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) shared his remarkable views on climate and clean energy on Glenn Beck’s radio show:

BECK: All right. Talk to me a little bit about oil. Are you a global warming guy?

SUNUNU: Drill here, drill now.

BECK: Okay.

He then launches into an anti-clean-energy rant (click here). Sununu has long been a global warming inactivist. But now that he is in the fight for his political life, Sununu says what he really believes to Beck while greenwashing his record in a public debate when the general public is listening (much as another Senator does recently, see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma“):

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[This is off topic to the extent that the presidential election is off-topic.]

If you are are like me — and I hope for your sake you’re not — then the campaign’s final days find you scouring the Web for every scrap of information on the state of the presidential race. Here’s a fascinating analysis from Pollster.com looking at the difference between polls that sample people with cell phones and those that don’t:

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One of the top (online) pundits in the country, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, thinks a McCain loss would make Sarah Palin the top contender for a Big-Oil-fueled presidential run in 2012. ThinkProgress’s uber-pundit Matthew Yglesias agrees.

Since the notion should be pretty scary to those concerned about clean energy and climate, and since Halloween is coming fast upon us, I thought I’d share with you Ambinder’s frightful thinking:

There’s a suspicion in some McCain loyalist precincts that Gov. Sarah Palin is beginning to play the Republican base against John McCain — McCain won’t let her campaign in Michigan…McCain won’t let her bring up Jeremiah Wright… McCain doesn’t like her terrorist pal talks….Think ahead to 2010…2011…2012.

Palin is ambitious. Very ambitious.

And if she wants the job, she’s easily the frontrunner to become THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness.

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Glad to see the League of Conservation Voters picked up on the New Hampshire town hall video I have been pushing here. For more background, see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma.”

The nation’s leading scientist has a new posting titled “Obstruction of Justice.” I have the greatest respect for Hansen as regular readers know (see links below).

Indeed, Hansen has been right on the climate threat longer than virtually anyone else (see “Right for 27 years: 1981 Hansen study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels“). But he misunderstands climate politics, or else he never would have written about the election and the “climate problem”:

There are differences between Presidential candidates, but neither appears to “get it.”

That puts him in the Ralph Nader crowd, which I just can’t stomach. If Hansen doesn’t understand the difference between the two presidential candidates on global warming, he should simply keep his views to himself.

In particular, McCain has a phony climate plan (see “McCain speech, Part 2: Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic“), has walked back on his climate advocacy for a year now, and actually chose a global warming denier for his running mate (see “Turns out McCain doesn’t care about global warming, the greatest threat we face“).

Furthermore, McCain has a track record of opposition for clean energy that is indistinguishable from that of the Senate’s leading global warming denier (see “The greenwasher from Arizona has a record as dirty as the denier from Oklahoma“).

As for climate policy, Hansen writes of the two candidates:

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The NYT’s Andy Revkin has the sorry story here:

For a 13-month stretch starting in March 2005, three environmentalists working for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network [CCAN] were listed in a Maryland State Police data base as being “suspected of involvement in terrorism.” The description went on to note that the police had “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime,” and the listing, and possible tracking, did not continue.

I’m good friends with the founder of CCAN, Mike Tidwell, and regularly appear on his radio show, Earthbeat, most recently on September 30 to talk about “The Candidates & a New Green Economy.” Mike is as much a terrorist as Barack Obama, notwithstanding certain equally absurd attacks on the Illinois Senator.

On his blog, Mike responds and urges everyone to email Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley:

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