Weekly Mulch: Climate Change Bill Stalls in Senate
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By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen should have cleared a path for the U.S. Congress move forward again on climate change legislation, but Senate Democrats already are saying the bill might not come in 2010. After fights over the stimulus and health care, legislators are less willing to stomach compromises on climate change. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is looking smarter for having passed the House’s version of the climate change bill when she had the chance.
Brian Beutler reports for TPM that in the Senate, conservative Democrats from coal, oil, and manufacturing states are taking a stand against cap-and-trade provisions, which would limit carbon emissions nationwide. According to Beutler, “It’s likely impossible that [President Barack Obama] and Senate leadership will be able to keep the Democratic party united to stop a filibuster of cap-and-trade legislation, which means Democrats will have to secure the support of a handful of moderate Republicans—nuclear energy enthusiasts, in particular—if they hope to pass a meaningful bill.”
After the House of Representatives passed a climate change bill in July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) set a September deadline for the six committees with a stake in the legislation to finish their work. Four months later, the Environmental and Public Works committee, the first to tackle the issue, is still debating a version of the bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA).
With slow progress on the Kerry-Boxer bill, more business-friendly options are bubbling up from the Senate. Sen. Kerry has teamed up with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and with progressives’ most reviled Congressman, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), to craft a bill that Republicans might support. Another effort, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), restricts carbon inputs rather than carbon emissions. (Need a refresher on proposed climate solutions? The Nation’s Chris Hayes can help.)
The Cantwell-Collins effort has at least one advantage over the House’s 1,498-page climate change bill, as David Morris reports for AlterNet. It’s only 39 pages—so far. More importantly, Morris writes, this strategy “treats carbon trading as a necessary evil, not the core of an emission reduction strategy, thereby probably earning the senators the eternal hatred of a Wall Street salivating over the potential bonuses another multi-trillion-dollar global securities market would generate.”
Despite these alternatives and resistance from some Democrats to cap-and-trade, Steve Benen notes at the Washington Monthly that the framework that the House passed in July and that provided the starting point for the original Kerry-Boxer proposal does have some positives.
“Proponents note that the policy has some pretty compelling selling points, including the fact that it caps emissions, combats global warming, reduces pollution, helps create new jobs in a burgeoning sector, and lowers the federal budget deficit, all at the same time,” Benen writes. If the Senate leadership gives into pressure from moderate Dems, he continues, the consequences are high.
“This needs to get done, and if the Senate takes a pass on 2010, it’s hard to imagine when the next available opportunity might be. It’s not as if this will get easier after Republicans make likely gains in the midterms,” Benen concludes.
Without a climate change bill in 2010, United States representatives will carry the same handicap—a recalcitrant legislature that could reject a global accord—to the next round of United Nations negotiations. Without legislation to back their proposals, U.S. negotiators lose the power to hold other countries’ accountable to global climate change goals.
Already, the U.N. is planning how to improve the treaty process for next year. As Andy Kroll notes at Mother Jones, “The world has changed considerably—economically, ecologically, socially, etc., etc.—since the existing UN treaty process was set into motion after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where countries drafted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that each subsequent Conference of the Parties, or COP, attempted to build on and improve.”
Splitting the world into industrialized, developed, and developing countries may no longer make sense, writes Kroll. Smaller, less developed nations did their best to alert the conference to their needs, but the final agreement came from larger powers like India and China, developing countries with agendas markedly different than those of nations like Tuvalu. The unenthusiastic reception of that deal highlighted problems with the treaty process as much as disagreements among the participating nations.
“If the recent climate talks illustrated anything, it’s the extent to which the current treaty framework—an unwieldy process in which consensus among the 192 participating countries is near impossible—no longer serves its intended purpose of guiding nations toward meaningful, rigorous emissions reductions,” Kroll writes.
As global leaders try to move forward from Copenhagen, the impact of that breakdown should become clearer, as Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard explains. “Because the document was not adopted unanimously, it has no real legal or formal bearing—it may never play a role in future UN deliberations.” Sheppard writes. “Converting this accord into meaningful action will be torturous. For all the angst the document provoked, it is extremely vague and leaves many key details unresolved.”
For years, the United States would not commit to the climate change goals agreed on through the U.N. treaty process, and now, any progress the Congress does make may come too late.
“Although Obama said on Friday that he and other leaders remain committed to a new, legally binding treaty in the future, there is no road map or timeline in the accord to reach such a goal,” Sheppard explains.
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Climate change is the most serious problem facing the world today. From the beginning of the human race until about 100 years ago CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts per million (PMM) but since then CO2 has increased by 107 PPM to the current 387 PPM level and it increases by 2 PPM each year from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Scientist’s observe 70 million tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere every 24 hours from smoke stacks and tail pipes.
The most obvious sign of climate change is melting glaciers. Over 30 glaciers in 9 mountain ranges around the world are melting rapidly. Some areas are inundated with too much water while others wither from extreme droughts. Bigger and more frequent storms ravage some areas while wild fires singe others.
The relationship between climate change and CO2 is no new concept. Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist discovered the connection in 1896. As scientists observed the increasing magnitude of impacts on glaciers, permafrost melting in the arctic, ice-shelf deterioration in Antarctica, the northern migration of diseases like malaria, and the depletion of water supplies the urgency of doing something about it became obvious.
Let’s bag the history lesson and cut to the chase. Because of the urgency and magnitude of global climate change, many scientists and countries around the globe looked at the COP-15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen as the do-or-die summit to get a meaningful commitment to cut CO2 to at least 350 PPM to avert catastrophe.
Island countries like the Maldives are frightened about sea level rise and want immediate action while poor third-world countries strongly protest what they see as an “outrageous attempts by rich countries to kill the previous Kyoto climate summit targets in Copenhagen.”
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up and delivered a slam-dunk take-it-or-leave-it proposal to provide $100-billion to developing countries by 2020 as long as they agree with U.S. terms which included killing the Kyoto agreement, ditching legally binding measures for a vague concept of “transparency,” and eliminating universal emissions targets for vague “national plans”, and completely dropped a plan that the U.S. signed with the UN climate convention agreeing that rich countries that emitted the most CO2 take the lead in cutting it.
Alright, when I look at the famous photo of the beautiful blue earth taken from Apollo 17 in 1972, I can strain my eyes but I can’t find a political boundary on it. Regardless of our race or origin, we are of this Earth and we have nowhere else to go. We have got to quit spending trillions of dollars on killing ourselves in wars and spend it on lowering CO2 levels to at least 350 PPM as fast as possible or civilization simply will cease to exist – pure and simple. If we can invest trillions in war why can’t we divert that to cutting CO2? The bottom line is, if the earth goes into climate upheaval, and that’s where we’re headed, there won’t be an economy.
To try to drive that point home, on December 12th around 100,000 citizens from around the world staged a 5 Km demonstration march in Copenhagen from the Parliament Building to the Bella Center where COP 15 was held. The overwhelming message was to stop bickering over money, work together and get on the fast track to lower carbon emissions. Younger generations feel their future is being short-sheeted by the older generations who now control industry and the government. They recognize that as long as older generations profit from doing business as usual, they don’t give a hoot about future generations.
The prevailing mind-set at the demonstration was that if COP 15 failed – which it did – it is the younger generation’s obligation and moral right to take matters into their own hands by any means necessary – be it through radical and violent methods – to wrestle the control they must have to assure them a survivable future. Brace yourself world, a new reality is coming.
669 words © 2009 Richard Whiteford
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