How Important is a United Front on the Climate Bill?
As fans of clean transportation and sustainable development join the push
for a strong climate change bill to emerge from Congress, it's worth
remembering that not all environmental groups support the approach
congressional Democrats have chosen.
Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) (Photo: AP)Friends of the Earth (FoE) joined Greenpeace in opposing
the House climate bill as too weak and deferential to polluting
industries, and FoE president Erich Pica has just issued a statement on
today's passage of the Senate version that makes clear his view hasn't changed:
Whilethe bill reported out of the Senate Environment and Public WorksCommittee today is in some ways better than the bill that passed theHouse in June ... it remains a woefully disproportionate response tothe tremendous economic, security and public health threats posed byglobal warming.
The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulatedcarbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who broughtus the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve globalwarming. The bill showers polluting corporations with billions ofdollars, but doesn’t require them to reduce pollution fast enough toavoid devastating climate change impacts. And it contains massivecarbon offset loopholes that would allow U.S. polluters to keeppolluting by paying for often-non-existent pollution reductionsoverseas. Other loopholes, such as excluding pollution from bioenergy,also undermine the bill’s intent.
Plenty of folks in the green advocacy world are more open to working within the Senate's framework -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, to name a few. But the lack of a unified front from environmental advocates, which reared its head
during the House climate debate over the summer, risks amplifying the
lack of a unified front among the very same Democrats who must help
bring the bill over the finish line.
The Senate is a
singularly cautious place that often seems tousled by the slightest
shift in the political winds; witness Senate Commerce Committee
Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who hails from coal country and mused yesterday
that he doesn't "think people in my state are going to stand up and
start cheering about Copenhagen," where global pollution reduction
talks will open next month.
Simply put, the more schisms
begin to show in the Senate climate debate, the more lawmakers such as
Rockefeller may push to de-emphasize the issue.
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