Can the climate bill’s death help build a living climate movement? The Rising can defeat the pirates of the new age By Gar W. Lipow on Grist Sunday Aug 7 2010
David Roberts, probably as close to an official voice as Grist magazine has, blames the climate bill failure on five obstacles: 1) The broken Senate, especially the filibuster, 2) The economy, 3) Republican obstructionism, 4) Centrist Democrats, 5) Obama. Brad Plumer at the New Republic chimes in with what is pretty much a me too.
Matt Yglesias is less specific, but argues: "In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down."
In short, the odds were against passing a climate bill. The failure wasn't the corporate environmentalists fault. Of all the mainstream environmentalists, Bill McKibben almost gets it, gets it halfway:
> For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you’re supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.
By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts. Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: "We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further.”
> And even that was not enough. They were left out to dry by everyone -- not just Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn’t lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight.
> The result: total defeat, no moral victories.
McKibben deserves credit for finally noticing what was tried didn't work. No really, he does. Some on his part of the political spectrum think deal making and compromise is all there is to politics. The deal making just has to be done better next time.
At the same time, it was really foolish to depend on deal making in today's political climate. Blaming defeat on institutional barriers and unreasonable opponents invites an answer from an early scene in "Pirates of the Caribbean" where Will Turner complains that Pirate Captain Jack Sparrow has cheated in a sword fight. And Jack Sparrow calmly replies "Pirate". If you complain that Republicans, and right wing Democrats, and big corporations care more about short term profits than the fate of civilization, they could rightfully reply "Conservative".
Cap-and-trade itself is an example of the failure of deal making with conservatives on the climate issue. When the Clinton administration took office in 1993 it offered a market based approach to fossil fuel pollution, a BTU tax. A variant on a carbon tax, a BTU tax would have taxed heat value rather than emissions. This would have lowered the impact on coal compared to oil and natural gas, but would have raised the price of all fossil fuel in the long run. Since the revenue would have displaced corporate income taxes, it would have overwhelming benefitted the rich. In short, it was a perfect conservative policy to tackle fossil fuel pollution, and one that many conservatives had loudly advocated for. But when actually offered the chance, Republicans, and conservative Democrats, and corporate campaign donors overwhelmingly opposed it, and used it as a campaign issue to defeat Democrats.
This story has a second chapter. The international Kyoto protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1997. Originally it was expected that the new protocol would simply strengthen and add teeth to existing convention, with national targets for the rich nations, penalties for failing to meet those national targets, and funding for voluntary action by poor nations. There was some talk of a carbon tax to reinforce these other features. But, on behalf of the Clinton administration, Al Gore parachuted into the negotiations, and (with the help of the EDF and other conservative environmental organizations) persuaded other nations that there was no way the U.S. would sign on to any treaty with national targets if there were penalties for non-compliance. Instead he sold an elaborate trading scheme as a way to get the U.S. on board What is more, the horrible Clean Development Mechanism counterfeit offset provisions of the treaty were also included as a way to get the U.S. on board, in spite of the fact that just prior to this, the U.S. Senate had rejected any Kyoto style treaty 95 to 0! Unsurprisingly the concessions Gore won did not result in U.S. ratification.
The mainstream environmental movement begins to look rather like Charlie Brown, eternally letting Lucy hold the football so he can kick it, eternally surprised when Lucy pulls the football away, and he tumbles down into the dirt and grass.
And it is not as though that was the last case where the football was pulled away. McCain ultimately opposed the McCain-Lieberman bill. To take a non-environmental example, Democrats weakened the stimulus bill to attract the support of Republicans who ultimately voted against it. So when Lindsey-Graham turned against the climate bill he helped draft, it should have been no surprise.
The conservative movement has a long history of opposing anything that would make life better in the USA. Conservatives opposed women getting the right to vote after WWI. They opposed the creation of Social Security, the minimum wage and all the other programs that help mitigate the effects of the Great Depression. Conservatives opposed anti-lynch laws, they opposed the civil rights laws that ended Jim Crow. They opposed environmental protection. I think the position of conservatives can best be understood through analogy to a 1981 John Carpenter film.
Escape from New York was set in a future New York City (in distant 1988!) which had been turned into a giant maximum security prison. Reactions to its cartoon violence, cynicism, B-movie sensibility and badly concealed idealism vary from love to hate to mockery. But I suspect that when the modern conservative movement sees the metropolis where Snake Plissken's adventure is set, they see the world they aspire to create. A world where you have nothing you don't buy or take by violence? Check. A world ruled by roving violent gangs, like Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq? Check. A world where women are property? Check.
Conservatives lie routinely, and when they make deals their word is garbage. That may not apply to ordinary people who take conservative positions, but among conservative leadership, whether politicians, political consultants, or pundits and media figures there are almost no exceptions.
What did "mainstream" environmentalists think they would achieve through negotiations with people whose goal, whether they know it or not, is to create hell on earth? Heck on earth?
Read the rest (and see the links) at: http://www.grist.org/article/can-the-climate-bills-death-help-build-a-living-climate-movement http://tinyurl.com/climatepirates
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