The Congressional System vs. the Solar System

What part of “our planet’s future is in your hands” do our congresspersons not understand? 

Despite the tendency of certain Administrations to have scientific truth rewritten by public relations professionals, the knowledge that carbon emissions must be greatly reduced on both national and planetary scales has become rooted in the national consciousnesses in recent years.  For some time now, our response to the guy in the local bar whose favorite line is “this global warming nonsense” has been:  just because a piece of news is unwelcome, it doesn’t mean it’s untrue… 

From Here to There… 

We have to believe that if a barfly can be made to understand the overarching need for emissions reductions, there’s a good chance that a preponderance of lawmakers in Washington already do.  And yet, the events in our nation’s capital in recent weeks have given us cause to wonder whether a number of them have checked their understanding on the Capitol steps.  Because what started as a great idea by President Obama to reduce carbon emissions and create a clean energy industry full of green jobs has become, in Congressional hands, an exercise in satisfying short-term priorities and local business concerns.   

How did we get here?  From a presidential call to fund our clean energy future by auctioning 100% of emissions permits to a bill in which only 15% of permits will be sold, most of the rest being handed out, like canapes at a Washington reception, to utilities and carbon-intensive industries.  From an initiative that could have shown the world that the U.S. is providing serious leadership in the climate disruption fight to a situation where the energy bills prepared by House and Senate committees contain so many concessions to congresspersons dependent for their professional lives on the goodwill of the fossil fuel lobby, or the agriculture lobby, or the local chamber of commerce, that the bills are just a legislative waste of time.   

How did we get here? 

We got here because our system, and its ability to set us on the right path for a long journey, is broken.  Despite the above comments comparing politicians to barflies, we really do believe that most of the former group grasps the need to respond vigorously to the energy-climate crisis;  the realities of our political system, however, skew their priorities to the short-term, to the immediately popular, and to what’s expedient for their political survival.  What matters forty years, twenty years, ten years from now is over the horizon of the planet our founding fathers gave them to inhabit. 

As Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum puts it:  “(climate change) pits the present versus the future–today’s generation versus its kids and unborn grandchildren.  The problem is, the future can’t organize.  Workers organize to get worker rights.  Old people organize to get health care.  But how can the future get organized?  It can’t lobby.  It can’t protest.”* 

…and Back Again 

Ironically, it’s that very body — Congress — that’s supposed to be forward-thinking enough to work for a future that the rest of us can’t imagine or affect.  It’s Congress that could be passing a strong energy bill that would generate hundreds of thousands of new jobs;  Congress that could ease the transition to a clean energy economy for adversely affected states by concentrating many of those jobs within them;  Congress that could be taking the long view and making these bills more, not less, aggressive at the outset. 

Instead, this is what’s happened in the committee rooms of the Hill:

• The President’s national renewable energy target figure of 25% by 2025 has been hacked down to 20% by 2020 in the House committee and even lower (15% by 2021) in Senate committee.  It’s felt in some quarters that these anemic targets could undercut State renewable electricity standards already established, and—according to an NREL study—could actually lead to a decrease in the amount of renewable energy produced nationwide.
• Most publicly owned utilities, representing nearly 10% of power production, are being exempted from the renewable energy requirement.
•  Utilities are being allowed to qualify for an even lower renewable energy target if they build ‘clean’ coal plants or nuclear power stations.
• Instead of a 100% emissions auction, some 85% will be given away, mostly to power distribution and private coal companies, carbon-intensive industries, local natural gas companies and others.  10% will go to states for renewable energy and efficiency investment, and smaller amounts for tropical deforestation projects, advanced automobile technologies and adaptation to climate change.  Green job training gets one-half of one percent.
• Congresspersons from farm states and populous states are squabbling, not over whether emissions should actually be given away, but over which of them gets the bigger share of allowances.
• Mountaintop removal for coal production is being allowed to continue.
•  Some 100 coal-fired power plants now being planned will be allowed to be built without meeting new emissions standards. 

A Failing Grade 

It’s easy to picture legislators returning to their districts and being assailed by voters anxious that their energy bills might skyrocket, as some sources have claimed they will;  just as easy (but far less palatable) to envisage the same legislators being persuaded to a position by fossil fuel industry lobbyists using arguments rich with campaign contributions.  Assuming these legislators do understand the need for strict carbon regulation you might hope that, rather than let their voting performance be dictated by the unfounded fears of their constituents, they would explain that paying these relatively small increases will buy a healthier future for their offspring.  And assuming they have the intestinal fortitude portrayed in their campaign literature, you might hope they would explain to their donors that accepting these relatively large contributions will buy a future unhealthy for everyone’s offspring, including those of the lobbyists. 

But many of our legislators are failing us.  If ever there were a situation where the greater need of the nation and the planet should be allowed to suppress the process of self-interest that drives so many Congressional votes, this would surely be it.  If ever there were a time for congresspersons to say to their constituents and contributors, “I understand your fears;  I’ll do my best to soften the blow, but this is one occasion where the importance to the world of our passing a strong bill has to take precedence over local issues”, it would be now.  But too many congresspersons are seeing the energy bill not as an opportunity to show courage, but as one to score points on the home field, regardless of the enervating effect of their actions on such a critical bill. 

Not the Greatest Generation 

In recent years we’ve adopted the label “America’s greatest generation” to describe those who, at the height of World War II, set aside personal priorities and fears to respond robustly to the greater world crisis — a generation whose members put their own futures on hold and their own lives at risk in unknown lands, in pursuit of a more secure future for all mankind.    It’s as well that we have a generation within living memory who have thoroughly earned that label, because it would be very difficult to apply it to those of us who, today, find small sacrifices and minor inconveniences too great a price for securing the future of the only world we have.  For too many, it seems that no end is important enough to be worth pursuing unless the pursuit itself is quite painless.  This is not the stuff of a greatest generation. 

We can get Fooled – but can they? 

House leadership, bolstered by enthusiastic reviews from a sampling of advocacy groups, has been congratulating itself on (narrowly) passing its version of the 2009 energy bill – the American Clean Energy and Security Act.  But in the devilish details we find little that will fuel aggressive movement to a clean energy economy, and we even understand that the bill in its present form will face a tough fight when the Senate takes it up in the fall.  So whereas the cheerleading on Capitol Hill may get the home crowd excited, let’s not forget that we have a crucial away game to play in Copenhagen in December.  Is this the document we will present to the world leaders gathered for the Kyoto 2 talks as proof of our commitment to climate change?  Because even if Congress can fool the average American, our delegates are unlikely to be able to fool the rest of the world, particularly the Chinese, who will be looking for progress, not placebos.  If this is the best we can do for ourselves, we have no reason to expect China to throttle back its own economy to clean up its power supply. 

Some countries, including Japan and many European states, are committing themselves to climate change mitigation.  Even the Chinese have established emissions reduction targets.  And that means that we have to.  Because by following the pain-free path that wishes all this energy-climate trouble would just go away, Congress is guaranteeing that the green jobs promised by the clean energy revolution will be created overseas, that the U.S. will be less and less competitive as time goes on, and that when the future does try to get organized the task may simply be beyond it. 

And when we say ‘future’, that’s your children and grandchildren we’re talking about.  *quoted by Thomas Friedman in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008