By Bart King
The game is over for federal climate change legislation in the United States, and we lost. A majority of lawmakers in both houses of Congress, a motivated administration, a devastating oil spill and a willing public were not enough to establish a new energy policy that would reward renewable resources and phase out the use of fossil fuels.
Hopes were high when our basketball-loving president came in with a numerical advantage in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The financial crisis ate a lot of time off the clock, as did the struggle to win on health care and pass Wall Street reforms. Along the way, Democrats lost the supermajority when one of their key players went down, and team unity dissolved as moderates, with eyes on midterm elections, became more interested in scoring points for corporate farms and coal companies. In the end, team climate change never even got a good shot off.
I was one of those overly optimistic fans who thought we could win it all—a strong cap-and-trade program combined with an ambitious renewable energy standard requiring the production of 25 percent renewable energy by the year 2020.
But as the season progressed, I lowered my expectations. The cap-and-trade program passed by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2009 included huge corporate giveaways that had already proven to be a mistake in the Europeans’ game plan five years earlier. Likewise, the renewable energy target set by the House was only marginally better than business-as-usual projections.
Nonetheless, it was a start. And even a weak climate change law would have been enough for the U.S. to lead a global effort. Without a U.S. law, international negotiations fail, the United Nations loses relevance and limiting the effects of climate change becomes impossible. (See “Copenhagen is About More than Climate Change.”)
But the U.S. Senate is where things really fell apart. Thanks to the filibuster—a procedural rule allowing a minority of 41 votes to block any bill supported by up to 59 votes—Senate Democrats have been unable to reproduce even the limited success achieved in the House. With Democrats expected to lose seats in November’s elections, everyone knew time was running out to make a move on any serious legislation.
Tragic as it is, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill presented an opportunity for some last-minute magic (and heartbreak, as it turned out). As Americans watched crude oil spew from a pipe at the bottom of the ocean, public support grew for safer, cleaner energy policy. Democratic leadership rallied in the Senate, making the case that protecting against future environmental disasters goes hand-in-hand with cutting greenhouse gas emissions and shifting preference to renewables like solar and wind power.
But try as they might, the Democrats couldn’t get enough votes. First they suggested a scaled down cap-and-trade program, just for fossil-fueled electricity generation. No luck. Then they suggested a token renewable energy standard. No go. With the summer recess just days away, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced a limited energy bill in late July. It tightens oversight on offshore drilling and removes the liability cap that would keep BP from having to pay billions in economic damages to communities along the Gulf Coast. It also includes incentives for switching to electric vehicles and retrofitting houses for better energy efficiency.
These are good ideas, but they are pitifully inadequate to deal with the voracity of our fossil fuel addiction. The BP spill continued unabated for just under three months, releasing anywhere from 2.2 million to 4.3 million barrels of oil (a barrel is 42 gallons). The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that daily oil consumption in the U.S. in 2010 will be 19.5 million barrels—a slow year due to the economic downturn. And that doesn’t even take into consideration coal, which is the biggest and dirtiest problem.
