Working For Jobs

by Sarah Laskow.

Last summer, wildfires sped by drought turned large chunks of Texas into a moonscape. Nationally, 2011 saw the third worst wildfire season in the United States since 1960: More than 8.7 million acres of land burned.

It’s the job of congressional staffers working on energy and natural resources issues to know facts like this. But some of them have a more urgent and perverse interest in this particular statistic: they’re participants in a macabre annual office pool in which they try to predict how many acres of U.S. land will burn in wildfires.

Frank Gladics, a professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, runs the contest. On Tuesday he sent out 2011’s results in an email that was perhaps forwarded a little too widely. (Grist managed to obtain a copy, after all.) Participants in 2011 ranged from lowly legislative aides to powerful staffers, like Bruce Evans, the Republican staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The entrants Grist identified all worked on the Senate side of the Hill.

A morbid version of a jellybean-counting contest, the pool asks staffers to guess the number of acres that will burn each year; guesses that exceed the actual number, as reported in the National Interagency Fire Center Situation Report (PDF), are disqualified.

At best, this little stunt could be excused as gallows humor — a peculiar inside-the-Beltway bonding ritual for disaster wonks. Since wildfires level people’s homes, imperil both residents and firefighters, and serve as a barometer for climate-change-driven havoc, the annual game might also simply be tone-deaf, tasteless, and heartless.

According to rules laid out in the email, the contest is open to committee and personal office staff who cover energy and natural resources issues, as well as appropriations staff, because “you never want to leave them out — you might need a rider from hell someday.” The prize: one of Gladics’ hats. (Available: “the Wizard Hat; the When Pigs Fly Hat; or the mechanical Holly-Jolly Christmas Hat.”)

In case there’s a tie, participants are also asked to guess how many fire-fighting planes (“fixed-wing, heavy-slurry aircraft”) will crash, become unusable, or be grounded, and how many weeks those aircraft will be out of service. The tie-breaker prize? “Not one, but both” of Gladics’ elephant-head squeeze toys (with eyes that bulge when pressed).

The competition, which has been going on since 2003, is largely a Republican affair, although at least a couple of personal office staff of Democrats have thrown their hats in, too. This year’s winner was Chuck Kleeshulte, a professional staff member on the Senate energy committee who has also worked in the personal office of ranking member Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Asked about the poll, Robert Dillon, the minority communications director for the energy committee, said that it “highlights our concern with Forest Service’s treatment of public land.”

“We’ve got more and more Eastern senators on the committee,” he said, explaining that the contest is a way to enlighten those representative’s staff members, who might not be as familiar with the fire problems that plague the West.

“It’s not an official way to educate them,” Dillon said. “It’s a fun, backroom way to do it.”

The contest’s tongue-in-cheek tone doesn’t exactly match the solemn note committee members strike when they address the public. At a June 2011 hearing on wildfire management, Gladics’ boss, Sen. Murkowski, said of wildfires, “You worry about these things. You worry about what is happening within any given fire season, but to those who have lost property, those who have been threatened, we are very concerned.”

Murkowski has been critical of the Forest Service’s firefighting policy, and both her frustrations and her staffers’ contest trace their origins to 2003, when a fleet of aging firefighting aircraft was taken out of service. (These were planes similar to the heavy-slurry aircraft featured in Gladics’ tiebreaker question.) Since then, the Forest Service has been looking for a way to acquire large aircraft to replace the decommissioned fleet; Murkowski wants the agency to move more quickly and be more flexible.

Gladics, who works on wildfire issues, told firefighters as much at a conference last May: “Go back and look at alternate aircraft, including water-scooping aircraft. Our forests, the resources and communities can’t wait another 10 years while you wait for the existing fleet to become inoperable in hopes Congress will be forced to buy you that Ferrari you want.”

But the roulette wheel of congressional funding isn’t the largest challenge that’s facing wildland firefighters. As climate change worsens, fires like those that scorched Texas this year will multiply. Fire seasons are growing longer as snowpacks melt earlier, and drier conditions drive more fires, faster.

Gladics promised in his email that next year’s contest would start earlier than usual. As his fellow staffers heed his advice to “start sharpening your pencils and reading up on those statistic books from your college courses,” perhaps they will also consider the impact of climate change on the predictions they will make. But if they really want to raise awareness about the threat of wildfires, they should also probably find a way to do so that doesn’t involve squeeze toys.

Related Links:

These Republicans believe in climate change. And they vote

Time to be angry, not cynical, about corporate money in politics

Rick Perry advocates solution to climate problem he doesn’t believe in

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by John Walke.

Cross-posted from Natural Resources Defense Council.

Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected an extreme agenda
disguised as a jobs and transportation bill. This unsuccessful effort
was founded on the absurd notion that more pollution would mean more
jobs, and that what the country really needs is more of the congressional
paralysis and obstructionism that already wearies and disgusts
Americans.

This week, the Senate will vote again on repealing life-saving pollution standards—this time a Tea Party-backed attack on the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) that
keeps out-of-state smog and soot pollution from fouling the air of
neighboring communities. Once again, the dirty air champions are going
to talk about jobs, but the public already knows what the Senate
affirmed last week—dirty air and dirty water are not a jobs plan.

Last week’s failed legislation was Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R-Utah) Long-Term Surface Extension Act of 2011 [PDF]—a witch’s brew of Tea Party House Republican bromides about job creation that in reality were just poisonous attempts to:

kill health safeguards against mercury and toxic pollution from cement plants, incinerators, and industrial boilers;

quietly pass Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) truly radical REINS Act [PDF], which would allow just one chamber of Congress to block law enforcement of existing statutory safeguards, from clean air and
clean water protections, to food safety standards, to Wall Street reform;
and

just as quietly pass the insidious Regulatory Time-Out Act of 2011,
which would indiscriminately and nonsensically block the most
significant health and environmental safeguards, financial
responsibility reforms, and the like for one year, notwithstanding how
much damage and destruction to the American people or economy would
result from blocking those safeguards.

This week, Paul plans more of the same, with a resolution
under the Congressional Review Act to void EPA’s CSAPR. These standards will clean up dangerous smog and soot
pollution from the oldest, dirtiest coal-burning power plants in the
eastern half of the United States, saving lives and creating jobs by
cleaning up pollution.

EPA has projected that these clean air standards will prevent every year [PDF]:

up to 34,000 premature deaths;
15,000 nonfatal heart attacks;
400,000 cases of asthma attacks; and
1.8 million days when people miss work or school.

Moreover, these health safeguards will deliver up to $280 billion in
annual benefits to the American people, compared to $2.4 billion in
compliance costs to polluting coal-burning power plants, yielding
benefits that outweigh costs by an astonishing 116 to 1. Many
politicians and industry lobbyists claim to support benefit-cost
analysis; how much would health benefits to Americans have to outweigh
polluter compliance costs before Paul and his resolution’s
co-sponsors would support clean air safeguards? 200 to 1? 500 to 1?

Further proof for this extreme agenda is shown by the zealous
irresponsibility of Paul’s chosen weapon, a Congressional Review
Act vote that repeals not only the CSAPR, but also prohibits EPA from adopting “substantially similar” health protections.

The Congressional Review Act is a nuclear bomb with radioactive
spillover consequences: It voids not just the targeted safeguards, like
CSAPR, but also prohibits EPA from adopting similar protections, such
as a substitute for the Bush administration’s 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule. A federal court overturned [PDF] this rule in 2008. CSAPR responds to the court order to reduce
smog and soot pollution from power plants in a more protective manner
that complies with the Clean Air Act.

If a Congressional Review Act vote abolished CSAPR and blocked EPA
from reissuing a similar rule, this would make it extremely unlikely
that EPA could even reissue clean air standards achieving the same
emissions reductions as the weaker Clean Air Interstate Rule; the two
rules are substantially similar in numerous respects, including the
problems they target; the states, polluters, and pollutants covered; the
rules’ underlying modeling and rationale; the legal authority and
regulatory structure; etc. The result would be millions more tons of smog
and soot pollution from dirty power plants.

All of this explains why Paul’s extreme pollution agenda
already is attracting bipartisan opposition from more moderate and
responsible members, with five or more Republican senators expected to
oppose the CRA resolution.

The White House’s Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president
for energy and climate change, has authored an eloquent and ringing endorsement of the cross-state rule. One hopes this important backing represents
the prelude to a White House statement of administration policy (SAP)
recommending a presidential veto of Paul’s resolution, adding to the
laudable record of SAPs opposing House dirty air attacks this year.

The greater question remains, however: When will congressional
obstructionists finally abandon their stalling and ideological
pollution plans in favor of getting down to the business of moving the
country forward to a healthy and clean energy future?

Related Links:

Another Congressional Attack on Clean Air

How the EPA and states are failing to keep air clean

Is post-Jobs Apple going to stop poisoning China?

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Tom Philpott.

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

I have a really bad idea.

Let’s push farmers to plant as much as they possibly can of our most ecologically devastating crop. Maybe we’ll even get them to plow up some erosion-prone grasslands to do so. Then we’ll take a huge portion of the bounty (say, 40 percent) and subject it to a Byzantine, energy-intensive process that will turn it into something (barely)
suitable for internal-combustion engines. (Never mind that
internal-combustion engines, powering private pods over roads always in
need of extravagant maintenance, are a rotten way of converting energy
into mass locomotion.)

The production process generates a heaping amount of a byproduct tainted with antibiotics and industrial chemicals. No worries—we’ll feed that stuff to livestock on vast factory farms, even though it increases deadly pathogens in beef and does terrible things to pigs.
Since the whole idea is so clearly misbegotten, we’ll need to deploy
serious government support to keep it from stalling. How about decades
of lucrative tax breaks, bolstered in recent years by upward-spiraling
usage mandates? We’ll need a bit of PR, too, to keep the public from
squawking. Let’s just pretend that the product we’re peddling is a green, job-creating machine that will “wean us from foreign oil.”

You in?

That, in a nutshell, tells the story of America’s corn-based ethanol
boondoggle over the past three decades. (For the rollicking tale of how
the whole thing got started in the first place, go here). Over the same time span, we’ve allowed our national rail-transport system to wither into self-parody;
watched as cities defunded or neglected mass transit; failed to make
necessary investments in clean energy sources like wind and solar while
also declining to force fossil energy producers to pay for the massive
damage they cause; and, most recently, elected a Democratic president
who seems hell-bent on putting Sarah Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” energy vision into place. And through it all, our government’s blind, deep-pocketed loyalty to corn-based car fuel has endured.

But that may be changing … at least partially. Last week, the Senate voted 73-27 to remove one of the industry’s oldest and most-cherished
pillars: the tax break gasoline blenders get for every gallon of the
corn-based fuel they mix.

There’s no doubt that the tax break is a massive waste of resources
that must end. This year alone, the ethanol tax credit will cost the
Treasury $6 billion—equal to about 65 percent of the annual federal outlay for public school lunches.
  That means instead of propping up a crappy fuel source, we could boost
our annual investment in child nutrition by two-thirds without
increasing the deficit by a penny.

Another way to look at it is this: Ethanol sucks in about 75 percent
of the total tax breaks granted to alternative energy, leaving wind and
solar to fight for scraps. By pulling the plug at long last on the
ethanol tax break, we could make significant investments in energy
sources that actually reduce carbon emissions (unlike ethanol, which doesn’t).

But here’s the kicker: Even if the Senate’s move makes it through
the House and the White House—both hotbeds of ethanol boosterism—it
will do nothing to stem the flow of industrially produced corn from
Midwestern farms to distillers to gas tanks. That’s because the tax
break became utterly redundant when President Bush signed the 2007
Energy Act, which stipulated that gasoline makers inject a large and ever-growing amount of ethanol into the fuel mix.
  Take the tax break away, and the ethanol juggernaut will lurch on, 
sucking in billions of bushels of resource-intensive corn and spewing
out billions of gallons of low-quality car fuel.

Moreover,  savings from ending the ethanol tax break will not go to
crucial programs like school lunches or clean energy. Instead, they’ll
almost certainly vanish into the maw of Washington’s deficit hysteria.

In short, the Senate’s move to revoke ethanol’s multibillion dollar
annual grab from the national trough is both long overdue and futile.
Support for ethanol is too ingrained—so to speak—in our political
culture to be ended simply by taking away a redundant tax subsidy. To
put corn ethanol in its rightful place—the compost pile of history—would
require the Democrats to do something they have utterly failed to do,
under Obama or before: spell out a coherent national
energy/transportation policy that transitions us from fossil fuels to
true renewables. And that will happen not with draconian budget cuts,
but rather by spending money to build out a proper
renewable-energy/green-transportation infrastructure.

Related Links:

The Senate likes ethanol slightly less than it used to

SciAm op-ed: Kill biofuels to solve the food crisis

Critical List: Floods herald largest Gulf dead zone on record; the Senate hearts ethanol

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by David Roberts.

Can Senate Democrats snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory? Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

Politico has them bumbling around again, “scrambling” to react to an attack on EPA climate rules that has been telegraphed for months. I don’t know how much of this is genuine fecklessness and how much is Politico’s enduring love of portraying Dems as feckless, but either way, it’s hard to discern much feck.

The Upton-Inhofe bill, which would reverse EPA’s scientific finding of endangerment for greenhouse gases—and thereby permanently block EPA from addressing climate pollution—sailed through the House Energy Committee on Tuesday after what can only be described as a tragicomic show trial. It will go to a full House vote some time in the next few weeks, where it is expected to pass easily.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Reid has agreed to hold a vote on the Inhofe bill as early as Wed. In the best case scenario, Reid is doing something shrewd: holding a vote quickly, on the harshest bill likely to address the issue, while he knows he can win. He will heighten the contradictions, raise the stakes, and twist the arms of wavering senators to get to 40.

I fear, however, that something worse is afoot. This is, after all, the U.S. Senate. My fear is that Reid will offer to buy conservative Dem votes against the Inhofe bill by promising a vote on the Rockefeller bill, which would delay EPA regulations for two years. As I predicted long ago, Rockefeller’s bill has become the “moderate,” compromise option.

Yesterday in the Senate Rockefeller was making pious noises, decrying the Inhofe bill as too extreme. But the fact is, his bill would have the same effect in the end: it would kill EPA climate rules.

Here’s the problem: the Senate will probably vote down Inhofe’s bill. But Rockefeller’s bill could get enough votes to pass. Obama would probably veto Inhofe’s bill. But he might let Rockefeller’s pass as a rider. So Rockefeller’s bill has a better chance of getting through.

And think about it: what happens if a bipartisan group of legislators in 2011 block EPA rules for two years on the grounds that the economy can’t afford to take a hit? What happens is, the (false) message that EPA rules will damage the economy becomes ratified conventional wisdom. And in two years, do you think those same politicians will say, “eh, I guess the economy can afford to take a hit now”? No. The rules will get delayed again and eventually blocked for good. A two-year delay means death. The only difference is, Senate Dems can hide from responsibility for a while.

As is all too common for progressives, most hope at this point lies in Republican overreach. Perhaps rabid House Republicans won’t be satisfied with a two-year delay and the result will be deadlock. That’s probably the best we can hope for at the moment, unless Democrats muster some serious feck.

Related Links:

Fred Upton’s EPA-blocking bill will put more of your money in oil industry pockets

Politifact finds Republican claim to be false; Republicans don’t give a sh*t

Good news: New EPA boiler regs include output-based standards

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Incoming search terms for the article:

• rockefeller
• senate vote on epa rockerfeller 2011

by David Roberts.

Big news today: Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is retiring. He won’t run for reelection in 2012. All political pundits are required by law to write something about What This Means, so here goes.

First, it means Senate Dems are not very optimistic about their chances in 2012. Jim Webb (Va.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) are also declining to run for reelection. Janet Napolitano recently announced she won’t run for the open Arizona seat. The basic problem is that 21 Senate Dems are up for reelection in 2012 and fully a third of those races are in states that either went McCain in 2008 or lurched rightward in 2010. Republicans, meanwhile, are defending just 12 seats and are likely to have a financial advantage. It’s just a grim map for Dems and the smart money is on the Senate going Republican in 2012. Being in the minority is no fun.

Second, in the particular case of New Mexico, it’s probably not worth Dems panicking. If Obama is going to win reelection, he’ll win the state, and it’s a “lean Dem,” so a good Senate candidate has solid chance of winning.

Third and most importantly, Bingaman’s loss is a serious blow to greens. He is one of the few members of the Senate who truly understands U.S. energy policy, one of the few who has credibility across the aisle, and one of the few adept and effective enough to actually get stuff done. The rest of the green leadership in the Senate is either bumbling and ineffective (Barbara Boxer, John Kerry) or too junior to have the juice to make things happen (Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall).

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had my frustrations with Bingaman. He’s not as ambitious as I’d like. He largely stayed on the sidelines during the climate-bill debate, grumbling about how there aren’t enough votes, which sent a signal to other moderates to keep their distance. But in retrospect, there’s a case to be made that Bingaman was right: Dems might have had more success if they’d put forward a modest clean energy bill and let him lead it through his committee.

Regardless, this is a loss of a deep reservoir of clean energy expertise in an institution where such expertise is in woefully short supply. Hard as it is to believe, the Senate may be even worse on this issue after Bingaman is gone.

Related Links:

10 green ideas that are facing extinction

Obama’s International Climate Budget Proposal Would Make Key Investments

Obama, Chu try to slash the multi-miracle hydrogen program once again

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Bonnie Azab Powell.

Watching C-Span’s live coverage of the Senate deliberations yesterday over the Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510) is enough to make me long for a dictatorship to move things along. I mean really, would it kill Congress to computerize its voting?

As of Thursday morning, chances had looked good for passing S. 510, which considering we haven’t updated our food-safety laws since 1938, would have been a step forward. Consumer protection groups had made a deal with the sustainable agriculture camp to revise the
Tester-Hagan small-farm amendment enough to get it included in the Manager’s amendment to the
bill, meaning if S. 510 passed, then both the Republican and Democrat sides had agreed to that the smallest farms and processors should be regulated appropriate to their size.

And then the speeches—and the shenanigans—began. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) decided that now would be a great time to stick in amendments about
banning earmarks and the health
care act, respectively. That this would almost complete undo a year’s worth of work over S. 510 obviously doesn’t bother Coburn, who said in his speech that he doesn’t believe we have a food-safety crisis, that we have the safest food in the world, and that the FDA and the USDA are doing a bang-up job of protecting Americans. Except, he explained, they don’t really have to, because the invisible hand is keeping us all safe: companies gladly recall their contaminated products because uh, death is bad for business. Senator Coburn conveniently has forgotten the part where Peanut Corp. of America elected to ship its peanut butter even after salmonella tests came back positive. Death is only bad for business if the lawyers can trace the poison back to you.

Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had threatened to keep the Senate in town over the weekend to
finish the bill, it’s ben deferred until after Thanksgiving. On November 29 two more cloture votes will be held,
one about whether to shut down debate on the Manager’s amendment and the other to end debate on the bill. For those who speak Congress—and I don’t—Philip Brasher has a much more detailed report over at the Des Moines Register.

In other news, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) will chair the Senate agriculture commmittee, after Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) chose to remain head of the Senate budget committee. As Tom Philpott wrote a few weeks ago, Michigan’s diverse agricultural economy (the second most diverse, after California) might give Stabenow a different perspective on agriculture than her commodity-farming neighbors or Conrad would have had. Stabenow has been active on behalf of “specialty” crops—or what regular people know as fruits and vegetables—as well as biofuels, which is more concerning. “Not only does agriculture create jobs and feed our families
      across America, but it is also helping us develop new fuels and energy
      sources,” she said in her statement accepting the chairmanship.

Related Links:

The Onion serves up some ‘wrath-minded’ GM taters [VIDEO]

Tester amendment protecting local food production now attached to food-safety bill

Industry groups putting the screws to senators over food-safety bill amendments

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Incoming search terms for the article:

• stabenow Tester-Hagan

by Daniel J. Weiss.

This article was cross-posted from the Center
for American Progress.

President Barack Obama took office with four major domestic
agenda items: a plan to prevent the recession from growing worse
and launch recovery; health care reform; financial reform to avoid
future meltdowns; and clean energy and global warming legislation to
create jobs, reduce oil use, and cut pollution. The president succeeded
with the first three items. But clean energy legislation died in the
Senate after passing the House.

The Oct. 6 New Yorker has a “behind
the curtain” dissection of the rise and fall of climate legislation
in the Senate. It provides an interesting insider view of the always
messy legislative process.

Reporter Ryan Lizza details some senators’ admirable willingness to
stretch beyond their comfort zones on some energy issues to cement an
agreement that would establish declining limits on carbon dioxide and
other global warming pollutants while allowing more offshore oil
drilling and subsidies for nuclear power. He also notes the critical
miscommunications and different approaches by senators and the Obama
administration that reduced prospects for success.

Lizza gives short shrift, however, to the real reasons Senate passage
of climate legislation was impossible in 2010: the deep recession,
unified and uncompromising opposition in the Senate, and big spending by
oil, coal, and other energy interests. Let’s take a close look at these
factors.

The Great Recession took its toll

Many economists described this latest recession as the worst since
the Great Depression in the 1930s. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark
Zandi note in the July 2010 report “How
the Great Recession was Brought to an End”:

Eighteen months ago, the global
financial system was on the brink of collapse and the U.S. was suffering
its worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Real GDP was falling
at about a 6% annual rate, and monthly job losses averaged close to
750,000. Today, the financial system is operating much more normally,
real GDP is advancing at a nearly 3% pace, and job growth has resumed,
albeit at an insufficient pace. [Emphasis mine.]

The economic decline sped up just as Obama took
office. Unemployment jumped from 6.2 percent on Labor Day 2008 to 8.2 percent by
Obama’s State of the Union on Feb. 24, 2009. Nobel Laureate Paul
Krugman noted in March 2009, “At first, the current recession
didn’t hit industrial production all that hard. But the pace accelerated
dramatically last fall. At this point we’re sort of experiencing half a
Great Depression. That’s pretty bad.”

After unemployment
peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009, the jobs picture has not
gotten significantly better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just
announced September 2010 unemployment rate held steady at 9.6 percent. AP
reported, “The jobless rate has now topped 9.5 percent for 14
straight months, the longest stretch since the 1930s.”

These and other effects of the recession significantly added to many
Americans’ long-term economic uncertainty or fear. And this economic
environment made politicians much more susceptible to Big Oil, dirty
coal, and other special interests’ “tired dance, where folks inside this
beltway get paid a lot of money to say things that aren’t true about
public health initiatives,” as noted by EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson. This includes skewed
studies funded by the oil industry that predicted that global
warming pollution reductions would devastate the economy.

The terrible economy and growing unemployment made it much more
difficult to pass clean energy and global warming legislation. In fact,
an analysis of the unemployment rate when fundamental environmental
protection laws were enacted since Earth Day 1970 found that the annual
unemployment rate was 6 percent or lower most of the years of enactment. (See chart below.)

This includes all of the major pollution control laws and the Endangered
Species Act. These laws established public health safeguards and
pollution reduction requirements for industry. This assessment does not
include nonregulatory laws such as public lands protection laws. Nor
does it include laws that have some pro-environment provisions as part
of a broader bill, such as the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

 

 

The first Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (hazardous waste disposal) were
all enacted when unemployment was 6 percent or lower. Unemployment is 50
percent higher now. Only four major environmental laws were enacted
with annual unemployment over 7 percent, and none with
unemployment greater than 7.5 percent. Unemployment averaged 9.3 percent
in 2009 and 9.7 through September 2010.

In other words, the worst unemployment in nearly 30 years made the
up-hill climb to pass a global warming bill even steeper. And certainly
the special interests’ opposed to action on global warming played on
Americans’ concern about unemployment to frighten senators into opposing
global warming action.

For instance, the National
Petrochemical & Refiners Association urged strong opposition to
the American Power Act:

The draconian carbon reduction targets and
timetables in this bill would trigger destructive change in America’s
economic climate. This would add billions of dollars in energy costs for
American families and businesses, destroy the jobs of millions of
American workers, and make our nation more dependent on foreign energy
sources … If senators want to increase the loss of manufacturing jobs in
the United States and postpone the resurgence of the American economy,
then they should vote for this bill.

The American Petroleum
Institute bought a series of television, radio, and print ads threatening job killing energy taxes. Its homepage headline reads, “More jobs not more taxes.”

The heavily funded U.S.
Chamber of Commerce has also poured money into defeating climate
and clean energy action for the last several years. More recently, the
Big Coal backed Faces of
Coal front group staged rallies in protest of EPA’s proposed global warming pollution regulations with
signs reading “Coal Keeps the Lights on,” and “Coal Miners ‘Dig’ Their
Jobs.”

Whatever it is, we’re against it!

As if high unemployment weren’t enough, Senate advocates of clean
energy and global warming pollution reduction legislation had to contend
with Senate rules that allow unlimited debate.

This required bill sponsors to persuade a 60-vote “supermajority” to
end debate and pass their bill. With several Democrats unalterably opposed to
action to reduce global warming, the sponsors needed support from at
least four or five Republican senators.

Lizza describes that this was difficult to achieve because opposition
to global warming pollution reductions had grown in GOP ranks. What’s
more, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kan.) convinced his
senators that their route to the majority was a solid wall of opposition
to whatever Obama wanted to do for the nation.

Lizza reported that:

The Republican Party had grown
increasingly hostile to the science of global warming and to
cap-and-trade, associating the latter with a tax on energy and more
government regulation. Sponsoring the bill wasn’t going to help McCain
defeat an opponent to his right.

By not automatically resisting everything
connected to Obama, these senators risked angering Mitch McConnell, the
Republican leader and architect of the strategy to oppose every part of
Obama’s agenda, and the Tea Party movement, which seemed to be gaining
power every day.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and Lindsey Graham
(R-S.C.) (before he dropped out), the champions of climate legislation,
could never break this wall of opposition or neutrality even among
Republican senators who had previously sponsored or voted for global
warming legislation.

This includes Sen.
John McCain (R-Ariz.), who sponsored multiple global warming pollution
reduction bills and advocated significant reductions during his 2008
presidential campaign. Sen.
Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) also co-sponsored global warming bills in
previous Congresses. Nearly four years ago, Sen.
Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said: “It seems to me just prudent that we
recognize we have climate increase and temperature change. We have CO2
loading and we need to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Yet none of these senators publicly supported action or engaged in
serious negotiations with key climate legislation crafters Kerry,
Lieberman, or Graham in 2010.

This Republican lockstep opposition to the energy bill and other
Democratic priorities is reflected in Senate floor voting patterns. Congressional
Quarterly developed a “Party Unity” score based on the
proportion of votes that “pitted a majority of one party against a
majority of the other.” Such votes reflect that each party’s position
was different, and a majority of the senators voted with their party.

The proportion of these party-unity votes have increased
significantly over the last 20 years. (See chart below.) In the 101st Congress,
serving from 1989-90, less than half the Senate votes were party-unity
votes. Before 2009, the highest proportion of Senate party-unity votes
occurred in the 104th Congress, from 1995-96. This was the so-called
“Contract with America” Congress with the first
Republican majority in both houses since 1953.

Republican leaders in 2009, however, adopted a strategy of opposing
Obama on every major legislative effort to deny him victories
that would enhance his popularity. Seventy-two percent of Senate votes,
therefore, were party unity votes. This grew to 79 percent in 2010,
which means nearly four of five votes were along party lines.

The 111th Congress also saw an increase in the proportion of
Republican senators voting with their party majority. Eighty-five
percent of Republicans voted with their party in 2009, while that
increased to 90 percent in 2010. By comparison, there were only three of 10
previous Congresses when Republicans were more unified.

Congressional
Quarterly describes the increased Senate polarization in 2010:

Almost four out of five roll call votes in
the Senate have pitted a majority of Democrats against a majority of
Republicans—the highest percentage of so-called party-unity votes seen
since Congressional Quarterly began tabulating them in 1953.

Most telling, however, is the support
accorded President Obama on the 51 Senate roll calls this year … where he
took a position. On average, Democrats supported him 95 percent of the
time, up from 92 percent in 2009. And Republicans backed away from their
50 percent average presidential support score last year to vote with
Obama just 42 percent of the time so far this election year.

Sen.
Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a conservative Democrat and no ally of global
warming legislation, noted that the Senate Republican caucus had become
more unified in opposition to Democrats. She said, “This Republican
Party’s not the one it used to be. There were moderates that would reach
out with those of us that were moderate on the other side, but that’s
not the direction they’re going in.”

The best bill money could stop

The House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and
Security Act on June 26, 2009. This bill was supported by some major
companies and trade associations, including the Edison
Electric Institute and the Nuclear Energy
Institute.

Fear of a consensus energy bill that had some industry support
galvanized most big oil and coal companies to invest heavily in their
efforts to oppose a Senate bill. Companies in these and other industries
thus spent records amounts of money on lobbying, campaign donations,
and other pressure tactics to defeat clean energy legislation in the
Senate. And this spending does not include millions of dollars spent on
message advertising, “astro turf” rallies (fake grass roots), and other
pressure tactics that do not require public spending reports.

Opensecrets.org found that
electric utilities and oil and gas companies spent more than $500
million in lobbying from January 2009 to June 2010, primarily to weaken
or defeat energy legislation. A Center for American Progress Action Fund
analysis found that oil companies were six of the top seven spenders on lobbying
and campaign contributions during this period, with ExxonMobil number
one.

Big Oil’s campaign contributions are heavily tilted toward
Republicans, who received
70 percent of the contributions that went to the two parties. Opensecrets.org reports:

[As] debate raged in Congress about offshore
drilling, energy independence, ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation and a shift
away from fossil-fuel energy sources … congressional candidates and
federal political committees nationwide have raked in more than $17
million from the oil and gas industry so far during the 2010 election
cycle—a number on pace to easily exceed that of the most recent midterm
election four years ago.

The recipients of the funds have remained
relatively consistent over the years, with Republicans accumulating a
majority of the industry’s campaign contributions.

The coal
industry, too, gave nearly 70 percent of its campaign cash to
Republicans.

The bigger picture

The New Yorker pulled back the curtain on the admirable but
frustratingly unsuccessful efforts of Kerry, Lieberman, Graham,
and others to achieve Senate passage of comprehensive clean energy and
global warming legislation. But Lizza pinning the blame on the White
House or senators misses the larger factors behind this huge
disappointment.

Al Gore spelled it out succinctly during an interview with Lizza
after the legislation was dead for the year. He agreed that the economy,
a unified wall of opposition in the Senate, and special interest
spending were at the heart of this outcome:

I asked Al Gore why he thought climate
legislation had failed. He cited several reasons, including Republican
partisanship, which had prevented moderates from becoming part of the
coalition in favor of the bill. The Great Recession made the effort even
more difficult, he added. “The forces wedded to the old patterns still
have enough influence that they were able to use the fear of the
economic downturn as a way of slowing the progress toward this big
transition that we have to make.

There were gale force economic, political, and special interest winds
blowing against global warming legislation in 2010 that were beyond the
influence of its champions. The question should not be “Why did they
fail?” but “How did they get so far?”

Related Links:

Come chat with New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza about climate in the Senate

The incredible shrinking Manchin

John McCain

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Incoming search terms for the article:

• Al Gore
• exxonmobil co2
• exxonmobil energy security
• ExxonMobil science jobs
• water climate

by David Roberts.

As I wrote yesterday, the real revelation of Ryan Lizza’s great New Yorker piece on the climate fight in the Senate is how deep the rot has gone in that institution. One aspect of Senate dysfunction that deserves emphasis is the degree to which policy is made out of ignorance.

Americans tend to envision corrupt government elites as all-knowing, all-seeing evildoers. That’s how government corruption tends to be portrayed in popular media—think every Secret Government Agency in every TV show ever. They know more than us and they’re using their knowledge to achieve their nefarious ends.

The truth, which becomes more and more apparent the closer one gets to centers of power, is that decisionmakers are often woefully uninformed. I was talking once with a staffer for a senator who was in the middle of the climate fight. “When I first got here, I was like everyone else,” he said, “wondering how much was malice and how much was ignorance. The longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve concluded it’s ignorance.” That fact is, he said, most senators, even the ones directly involved in the fight over climate policy, don’t know the rudimentary facts about climate change or clean energy. They understand very little about the policies in question or how those policies will affect their constituents. They know virtually nothing about the climate bill that came out of the House. Anybody with an RSS reader can quickly become more expert on these hugely consequential issues than the average senator.

As George Packer’s superb piece on the Senate (also in The New Yorker) makes clear, senators just don’t have time to study the issues much any more. They spend the bulk of their time fundraising and their working days are divided into frenetic 15-minute chunks. They operate on half-day news cycles, their offices fed a steady diet of cable news and Politico-style scorekeeping. The Beltway’s center-right conventional wisdom is all they’ve got; they don’t have time to dig deeper.

This passage from Lizza’s story jumped out at me:

On October 28, 2009, Graham was eating dinner at the Capital Grille, an expense-account steakhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Rick Davis, a Republican consultant who had managed McCain’s two Presidential campaigns. …

Graham came to the issue strictly as a dealmaker. He saw the Democrats’ interest in capping carbon emissions as an opportunity to boost the nuclear industry and to expand oil drilling. But now Krupp explained the basics of global-warming science and policy: how carbon trading worked, how farmers could use offsets to earn an income from growing trees, and how different lobbyists would affect the debate. Krupp told Graham that the crucial feature of the policy was the hard cap on emissions. The House bill required American carbon emissions to be seventeen per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. As long as that number held, environmentalists would show flexibility on most other issues. The dinner lasted three hours. The next day, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman held their first meeting as the triumvirate that became known to everyone following the debate as K.G.L.

Think about it: here’s a U.S. senator, a Republican, on the verge of an incredibly high-stakes gambit, betting his career on climate legislation his party opposes. And only on the night before he does it does he get around to actually learning how the policy will work, what interest groups are involved, what the goal is. And even then, the only source of knowledge he trusts is a fellow old rich white guy. (No offense to the very necessary Fred Krupp.)

That’s what it takes to get a senator to actually learn about the policies under consideration in his own institution: a career on the line and less than 24 hours left before a decision must be made. It’s like a procrastinating college student, only with vast power over the nation’s future.

Now imagine all those other Republicans. You think they know anything about cap-and-trade more than what the Heritage Foundation fed to their staffers? Go back and listen to some of the many hearings Congress had on this stuff over the last few years. The Republicans’ ignorance is aggressive, purposeful, and thoroughgoing. It’s strategic.

And it’s not just Republicans. Conservative Midwestern Dems are no better. Here’s another bit from the story:

When [Lieberman] went to lobby Evan Bayh, of Indiana, Bayh held up a map of the United States showing, in varying shades of red, the percentage of electricity that each state derived from burning coal, the main source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. The more coal used, the redder the state and the more it would be affected by a cap on carbon. The Northeast, the West Coast, and the upper Northwest of the country were pale. But the broad middle of the country—Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois—was crimson. (Indiana, for example, derives ninety-four per cent of its electricity from coal). “Every time Senator Lieberman would open his mouth, Bayh would show him the map,” a Lieberman aide said.

That map is the beginning and end of Bayh’s knowledge of climate policy. “We burn coal, you no pass!” And Bayh managed to preserve that minimal level of understanding throughout the entire debate, which extends back to the beginning of his worthless Senate career in 1998.

As it happens, extraordinary measures were taken in every iteration of the climate bill to protect Midwestern coal states: free pollution permits, consumer rebates sufficient to make the working and middle class whole, massive subsidies for CCS development, support for trade-exposed industries, pork for nuclear, on and on. The architects of climate legislation went to almost comic lengths to accommodate the substantive concerns of coal state senators. Coal utilities supported the damn bill!

And it made no difference. None. It didn’t change the tone or substance of the conversation in the Senate one iota. Bayh knows as little about it today as he did the day he won his daddy’s seat. Same with Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). They don’t lift a finger to learn more because learning more would just complicate matters. They’ve found a politically safe position and dug in, dumb as a box of hair and proud of it.

Related Links:

Lessons from the climate fight: it’s the Senate, stupid

Appalachia rises: Let’s do the same

Will Pete Rouse, Obama’s new chief of staff, push for climate action?

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Lisa Hymas.

Brad Johnson noted
earlier this week that all but one of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate
“dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight
global warming pollution.” Now, that lone climate realist—Delaware Rep. Mike Castle—has been knocked out. So make that all GOP candidates for U.S. Senate deny the need for
climate action.

Tea Party upstart Christine O’Donnell, who took out Castle
to become the Republican nominee for Senate in Delaware, is right in line with
her GOP colleagues on the climate issue. She has attacked
climate legislation as a “cap and tax energy scheme which would kill
6,117 Delaware jobs.” Sarah Palin, who endorsed O’Donnell and deemed her a
“mama grizzly,” noted approvingly that the candidate is “against
Obama’s cap-and-tax scheme.”

O’Donnell is also against
masturbation, as she explains in a 1996
MTV special about a pro-abstinence campaign she was involved in. “The Bible says that lust in your
heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust,” she
said. “If he already knows
what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?”

Why is she in the picture, indeed? Many Delawareans may be asking themselves that very question
this campaign season. 

Related Links:

Does climate change cause storms and civil wars?

Is global warming frying conservative brains in Alaska and Delaware?

Nearly all GOP Senate candidates deny global warming

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Joseph Romm.

Poor Carly Fiorina. To make conservative ideologues happy, she has
to abandon science and her previous positions on the key issues of
global warming and clean energy.

But to win election statewide, she has to appeal to the majority of
California voters, who understand that clean energy is the key to the
state’s long-term economic and job growth—and that unrestricted
emissions of greenhouse gases will devastate
California more than most states.

And so in her first debate with climate and clean energy champion
Sen. Barbara Boxer, she simply couldn’t give a straightforward answer to the
simple question of whether she supported the Big Oil funded Prop 23
effort to gut California’s landmark climate and clean energy law, Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32).

Let’s go to the videotape (watch to the end):

Ouch.

You know that you have screwed up as a conservative politician when
the center-right Politico
says so:

Fiorina’s major stumble came on the issue of Proposition
23, which would suspend AB 32.  She said the focus should be on federal
climate legislation and that she had not yet taken a position on the
proposition.

“If you can’t take a stand on Prop 23, I don’t know what you will
take a stand on,” Boxer responded.

Talking to reporters after the debate, Fiorina sidestepped the issue,
  saying she would “probably” take a position on Prop 23 before
November, though it’s not her main priority. She insisted the real
referendum on energy legislation “is on the ballot—and her name is
Sen. Barbara Boxer.”

You’ll note that Fiorina immediately jumps to the old right-wing
talking point created by Frank Luntz for conservatives who want to sound
like they care about global warming and clean energy without actually
having to do anything: We need to fund energy R&D.

As for her claim that AB 32 is a job-killer, not only do 118
economists disagree, but so did Fiorina and rational Republicans just two years ago:

Related Links:

Koch brothers jump into Prop 23 fight

California bags the plastic bag ban but makes solar leap

Latest Gulf oil well explosion was no disaster, but what does it say about offshore drilling?

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist