As the World Burns-How the Senate and the WH missed their best chance to deal with climate change

[kpete]

The Political Scene
As the World Burns
How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change.
by Ryan Lizza October 11, 2010

Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman, and John Kerry each sought a kind of redemption through climate-change legislation.


On April 20, 2010, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joseph Lieberman, along with three aides, visited Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, at the White House. The legislators had spent seven months writing a comprehensive bill that promised to transform the nation’s approach to energy and climate change, and they were planning a press conference in six days to unveil their work.

Kerry, of Massachusetts, Graham, of South Carolina, and Lieberman, of Connecticut, had become known on Capitol Hill as the Three Amigos, for the Steve Martin comedy in which three unemployed actors stumble their way into defending a Mexican village from an armed gang. All had powerful personal motivations to make the initiative work. Kerry, who has been a senator for twenty-five years and has a long record of launching major investigations, had never written a landmark law. Lieberman, an Independent who had endorsed John McCain for President, had deeply irritated his liberal colleagues by helping the Republicans weaken Obama’s health-care bill. Graham, a Republican, had a reputation as a Senate maverick—but not one who actually got things done. This bill offered the chance for all three men to transform their reputations.

The senators had cobbled together an unusual coalition of environmentalists and industries to support a bill that would shift the economy away from carbon consumption and toward environmentally sound sources of energy. They had the support both of the major green groups and of the biggest polluters. No previous climate-change legislation had come so far. Now they needed the full support of the White House.

The senators sat around the conference table in the corner of Emanuel’s office. In addition to the chief of staff, they were joined by David Axelrod, the President’s political adviser, and Carol Browner, the assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. Lieberman introduced his aide, Danielle Rosengarten, to Emanuel.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all#ixzz11WCBCE3i

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended, although I could only read half of this,

I will read the rest tomorrow.

Thanks for the thread, kpete.

[swilton]

2. The first few paragraphs of this article

lead the reader to believe that this legislation would have fundamentally shifted our economy to the extent that remediation of environmental damage would have been on the way had the legislation passed.

After reading the article, the bill was weakened by so many special interests - everything from agriculture, oil, nuclear power - residing in so many states represented by senators who want to get reelected from both parties - that I don't really think that the bill's failure was a great loss. For example cap and trade has been critiqued by many environmentalists as a system that favors the strong and discriminates against the weak...and lets polluters get by under the guise of an infinite number of tax loopholes - etc., etc....Similarly - why ask the oil industry to help write a piece of legislation to self-regulate?

The author mentions that there is no public pressure to get environmental legislation passed - ranked 21 of 21 issues in recent polls....I think it depends upon how the polls are structured and the questions are framed and who supports the polling.

I think the role of environmental organizations in this is to be scrutinized as well - some scholars have accused them of sell-out; infected with lobbyists - or accepting a weak bill for the sake of getting something started.

The article is long and well worth a read - it also raises as many questions as it answers.

Thanks to Kpete for posting!