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

Contrary to reports from many in the media, the prospects for a climate bill are as good as ever now that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has finished its work.  E&E News makes that clear in a series of interviews with key Senate swing votes,”Senate moderates see an opening now that EPW gridlock is history” (subs. req’d):

Baucus insisted that the bill would cross the finish line, which would require both Senate passage and a successful conference with the House. “There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s going to be this year. Probably next year.”

As I had noted last week, while the media was quick to jump over some seemingly negative statements from the Montana Senator, in fact it was clear from his words that Baucus will be voting for the final bill.

While many key moderates made clear they would not vote for the Boxer-Kerry bill that EPW voted out of Committee yesterday, everyone realizes that the process is going to start anew with Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman, who “will be working closely with the White House” to develop a separate bipartisan climate bill that can get 60 votes.

And contrary to some reporting, the EPW process has not undermined prospects for the new bipartisan bill:

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In a mid-day press conference with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) that followed a meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said:

We think we have a good team here to help create a dual track which we want to emphasize is done with the full consent and support of Sen. Boxer and of other senators involved in this process including the Majority Leader, Harry Reid.  We will be working very, very closely with the administration and fully respectful of all of the efforts made by each individual committee with jurisdiction in this area. and there are six of them. I happen to be chair of one. But there are five others. And they’re all equally important in their contributions to this.

Our effort is to try to reach out to broaden the base of support beyond the six committees of jurisdiction. And we’re going to do that working very closely with the chairs of those committees as well as with members across the Senate. The key here is to really negotiate once in a sense, not negotiate with ourselves and not negotiate just in the Senate and then not have the White House also at the table.

So we just completed a meeting with Secretary Chu, talking about his department’s parameters that might and might not be acceptable with respect to this legislation. We’re meeting this afternoon, the three of us, with Secretary Salazar and with Carol Browner who, as we all know, is the point person for the White House on this topic. We will be working closely with the White House over the course of the next weeks with a few to trying to pull together what ultimately could be presented to Sen. Reid and the leadership as a piece of legislation that we hope could get the 60 votes necessary to pass or more, and we would hope it would be more.

Brad Johnson at Wonk Room has Graham’s remarkable remarks and this video:

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Arianna Huffington posted “Obama One Year Later: The Audacity of Winning vs. The Timidity of Governing.  HuffPost asked for replies.  Mine is here and below.  I welcome your thoughts.  My bottom line:  On climate and clean energy policy, he has been anything but timid!

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues:  global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change — Hell and High Water — then all Presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures and rightfully so.

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in the year since he was elected is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives.  Three game-changing accomplishments stand out:

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The GOP’s approach to climate and clean energy policy has remained the same for decades — obstruction and obfuscation (see “Senate GOP propose 25% ‘Do-Nothing’ energy tax on Americans“).  Now, led by James “the last flat-earther” Inhofe, they are trying to stall climate legislation as long as possible, on the flimsiest of excuses, presumably because they want to make sure that there is no Senate vote on the bill before Copenhagen.

The excuse this time is that EPA supposedly hasn’t issued a full analysis of the bill — even though EPA has issued an analysis of the bill (see “EPA releases economic analysis finding cost to U.S. households of under $10 a month, bill consistent with global effort to stabilize at 2°C warming“) pointing out that it has only moderate differences from the heavily-analyzed House bill (Waxman-Markey), none of which would significantly affect the economic conclusions.

The best evidence this excuse is just a pretense is that the GOP never accepted the conclusions of the EPA’s detailed analysis of the House bill (see “New EPA analysis of Waxman-Markey: Consumer electric bills 7% lower in 2020 thanks to efficiency“).

TP reports on the GOP delaying tactics:

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Our guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a CAP Senior Fellow who lives in Colorado.  In the TV grab, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Glenn Beck deny global warming.

In his book “Crossing the Next Meridian,” University of Colorado law professor Charles F. Wilkinson called the timber, mining, grazing and water development interests who for too long dictated how our western public lands should be managed the “lords of yesterday.”

Western lawmakers with their politics still stuck in a 19th-century time warp continue to do the bidding of the lords of yesterday, who now include big energy interests. Witness the letter 16 House and Senate Republicans sent to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar protesting his secretarial order creating a Climate Change Response Council that is designed to coordinate efforts among Interior agencies like the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to cope with the impacts of climate change. The new council, the lawmakers said, represents an end-run around Congress and could be used to stifle oil and gas development and other activities on western lands on behalf of “special interest groups with narrow agendas”:

Businesses in the West are worried about potential court challenges and administrative action. These new rules will allow special interest groups with narrow agendas to block all existing and future activities on federal lands in the name of climate change.

Of course, the “special interest groups” these politicians attack are the Western people, with the “narrow agendas” of preserving their land and way of life against the ravages of uncontrolled development and runaway global warming.

Leading the charge in this effort to ignore the new realities of a changing climate is Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), one of the Senate’s leading opponents of legislation to regulate carbon pollution. Barrasso represents Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer, and is the chair of the recently formed Senate Western Caucus, a latter-day reincarnation of the 1970s “Sage Brush Rebellion” that fought federal oversight of Western lands, according to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Barrasso has previously temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s choice to head the air office at the EPA, fought the establishment of a CIA climate change center, and accused the EPA of “silencing” a dissenting voice to its finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health.

Salazar, whose department oversees public lands comprising about one-fifth of the U.S., most of it in the West, issued his order on climate change planning in mid-September. It sets up a council made up of senior officials to coordinate the department’s response to climate change, and establishes eight regional climate change response centers and a network of conservation cooperatives to work with states, localities and the public in developing strategies to cope with global warming impacts.

Barrasso and his co-signers see this as a conspiracy to get through administrative fiat what the Obama administration may not be able to get through climate legislation. “These regulations will hit the Western United States the hardest,” they charge in their letter. “Westerners will suffer from higher energy and fuel costs or simply be put out of work.”

If Barrasso et al. are genuinely worried about the western U.S. being hard hit, they should take a closer look at what climate change is already doing to the region. In the state of Wyoming alone, a mountain pine beetle epidemic spurred by climate change had claimed 1.2 million acres of forest by the end of 2008, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Elsewhere in the West, declining snowpack and earlier spring runoff will mean the Colorado River, the lifeblood for some 25 million Westerners, will be unable to meet demand as much as 90 percent of the time by mid-century, according to a recent study.

This was a Wonk Room repost.