Archive for category congress

The climate bill’s dead. Senate Democrats pulled the plug last Thursday on a bill that wasn’t even as good as the woefully inadequate House bill passed a over a year ago.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trotted out the well-worn “60 votes” excuse. Funny how we never heard about the so-called “60-vote rule” during the Bush administration, when it could have helped the country avoid a series of catastrophes and record deficits. Democrats have a big problem, because it seems inevitable that any bill capable of crossing the 60-vote threshold could be worse than doing nothing.

So we lost, and the special interests won. NYT columnist and Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman wrote the epitaph for climate legislation:

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

What’s next? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Several regulatory initiatives are underway, and the Obama administration has pledged to veto any legislation that attempts to suspend the EPA’s rulemaking authority.

It’s possible the United Nations could go ahead and do climate change mitigation without us.

As a way to salvage the 12-year-old Kyoto protocol, the United Nations has suggested amending its rules to require only four fifths of the countries to agree to a climate deal, effectively forcing the opposed nations to accept a cleaner earth. “It reflects a degree of desperation — and justifiable desperation — on the part of the UN,” says Mark Lynas, who advised the Maldives at the international climate summit in Copenhagen last winter.

If the amendment passes this August when countries meet in Bonn, Germany, it could prohibit rogue anti-climate-treaty states — such as the oil giant, Saudi Arabia, or major energy-using nations, such as the U.S. — from holding the treaty hostage. “We saw at Copenhagen how some countries blocked progress and we can’t allow that to happen again,” said Britain’s shadow secretary for energy and climate change Ed Miliband, according to The Guardian.

UPDATE: The Big Green Buy. The Nation’s Christian Parenti covers the need for government to step up and use its buying power to create economies of scale for energy conservation and renewable energy. The federal government is the world’s largest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. President Obama can make the switch by executive order, without congressional approval. For example, why isn’t the U.S. Postal Service relying on electric vehicles?