A Well-Oiled Machine
The politics of climate
change are a lot like the politics of gun control, at least in the sense that
President Obama meant when he asked in April 2013 how Congress could fail to
deliver gun control legislation when 90 percent of the American public wants
it.
Polling in 2013 shows
that 87 percent of Americans would like their national government to make clean
energy a priority; only 12 percent think that this should be a low priority.
The same poll showed
that 70 percent of Americans believe that climate policy should be a priority,
and 59 percent think the US should reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions even
if other nations do not.
Yet year after year, our
national policy mechanisms have stalled efforts to do both. What’s holding us
back? Special interests are, and more specifically, fossil fuel interests are.
In the year leading up to President Obama’s first election, expectations that Congress would pass some sort of bill limiting greenhouse gas emissions were high. The percentage of Americans who said in public opinion polls that they believed that climate change was happening and that something should be done about it was rising in the wake of two dreadful hurricane seasons.
At least one global
warming bill had gotten out of committee in 2007 in the Senate, and in 2009 the
House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and
Security bill. Financial analysts were beginning to talk more about the costs
of carbon emissions, often with the expectation that regulatory action was
imminent.
All that came crashing
to a halt in 2010, when, in July, Senator Harry Reid finally pulled the
legislation when no solution to various objections to it could be reached.
There is plenty of culpability to go around in this failure, but much of it can
be laid at the door of fossil fuel companies and electric utilities opposed to
any kind of emissions regulation.
Lobbying spending by
electric utilities peaked in 2010, after ratcheting up significantly in 2008
and 2009 after Mr. Obama was elected; the picture is similar for oil and gas
companies and coal mining companies.
It is noteworthy that
H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which would have
instituted a cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, had the fifth
highest number of clients for whom lobbying was carried out in the 111th
Congress. And this isn’t fifth out of ten, it was fifth highest for all issues
on which lobbying was conducted.
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at Triple Pundit.
