Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Hello again my Brothers And Sisters. Today I've been musing on the hypocrisy that we so often see from the Right Wing of American politics. Now one of the best hypocrisy busters out there is Rachel Maddow. She along with Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, and Stephen Colbert, are routinely pointing out the number of things said by specific Republicans out of one side of their mouth, only to later be contradicted by what they say out of the other side.
However there are on occasion examples of hypocrisy that are not necessarily attributable to any one specific individual, but rather to Republicans as a whole. Today I want to discuss two recent examples.
Here at The Opportunity Agenda, we talk a lot about values, and the importance of building communications around them. In fact, we built a whole organization around six core values that drive our work and the way we talk about it. We do this, of course, because these values matter to us. Seeing them realized and supported are central to our goals. But as NPR explained recently, leading with values is also a savvy communications strategy. In a story on people's beliefs about climate change, reporter Christopher Joyce describes findings from Yale's Cultural Cognition Project that people form their views about climate change, among other things, based more on their existing worldview - and values - than on the facts presented to them.
Richard Haigh runs Enaleni Farm outside Durban, South Africa, raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Check out this video from my conversation with Richard about his sheep, his garden, and the meaning behind the name of his farm:
Richard Haigh doesn't look like your typical African pastoralist. Unlike many Africans who grew up tending cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, Richard started his farm in 2007 at the age of 40. He quit his 9-5 job at a nongovernmental organization and bought 23 acres of land outside Durban, South Africa.
He wanted to totally change his life.
Today, he runs Enaleni Farm (enaleni means "abundance" in Zulu), raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Richard is cultivating GMO-free soya, as well as traditional maize varieties. "All the maize tells a story," he says. Like the sheep and cattle, many maize varieties are resistant to drought, climate change, and diseases, making them a smart choice for farmers all over Africa.
This sort of mixed-crop livestock system is becoming increasingly rare in South Africa, according to Richard, because of commercial farms that rely on monoculture crops rather than on diverse agricultural systems.
Richard likes to say that his farm isn't organic, but rather an example of how agro-ecological methods can work. He practices push-pull agriculture, which uses alternating intercropping of plants that repel pests (pushing them away from the harvest) and ones that attract pests (pulling them away from the harvest) to increase yields. He also uses animal manure and compost for fertilizer.
But perhaps the most important thing Richard is doing at Enaleni doesn't have to do with the various agricultural methods and practices he's using. It's about the "stories" he's telling on the farm. By showing local people the tremendous benefits that indigenous cattle and sheep breeds, and sustainably grown crops, can have for the environment and livelihoods, he's putting both an ecological and economic value on something that's been neglected. "Local people don't value what they have," says Richard, because extension agents have tended to promote exotic livestock and expensive inputs.
In addition, Richard asks himself "what can we do that is specific to where we live?" In other words, how can we promote local sources of agricultural diversity that are good for the land and for people?
Richard is also helping document the diversity on his farm. He's been sending blood samples to the South African National Research Foundation to help them build a DNA "hoof print" of what makes up a Zulu sheep. This sort of research is important not only for conserving the sheep, but for helping to increase local knowledge about the breeds that people have been raising for generations.
As a result of his conservation work, Richard and Enaleni Farm have been recognized by Slow Food International, which wants to work with the farm and local communities to find ways to ensure that the Zulu sheep don't disappear.
Richard hopes to share his knowledge about agriculture with local farmers, teaching them how to spot and prevent disease in indigenous sheep, as well as explaining agro-ecological methods of raising food.
As I sit here writing, I have the White House Health Care Summit running in the background. This is the meeting where President Obama invited Congressional leaders to sit down at the table in front of the American public and talk about how to find common ground over what has become a very divisive, political debate about healthcare.
Unemployment in the United States is a heart-wrenching problem, with 14.8 million Americans seeking work. [1]
Yet the same U.S. senators who gave trillions to bail out Wall Street are now offering a paltry $15 billion for a jobs bill that won’t create many jobs.
What an insult. In effect, senators are telling unemployed Americans that they matter little compared to Wall Street.
With unemployment so high, it’s time for a Green New Deal to tackle economic and ecological problems at the same time.
We should put Americans back to work with living-wage green jobs: retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, building modern mass transit systems, installing renewable energy technology, and conserving our irreplaceable ecosystems.
Instead, the Senate’s current bill fails to offer even a short-term solution to joblessness.
After bailing out Wall Street at a cost of trillions, all that the Senate Democratic majority will offer 14.8 million unemployed Americans is a jobs bill that union leaders have called “puny” and “like sticking a band-aid on an amputated arm”. [2]
Where’s the helping hand for the millions of jobless Americans who are struggling because Wall Street’s recklessness and greed caused an economic meltdown?
Last week, two conservative Republican Senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, called for an independent probe of the IPCC -- the international scientific body that summarizes the latest climate science -- and asked the Senate to halt all climate action until that happens.
As most of you are well aware, last week was a snow week in Washington, DC, and the odds are pretty good that there's something like that going on for you as well.
Our good friends in the conservative community have seized upon the moment as proof that this whole "global warming" thing is just a big scam perpetrated by the likes of Al Gore and his Legion Of Weather Nazis; their mission being only to deprive the American people of their Constitutional right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a Ford Super Duty F-450 King Ranch Edition with the Heavy Service Suspension Package, Snow Plow Prep Package, Transmission Power Take-Off Provision, dual alternators, and supplemental cab heater.
To drive the point home, last week Senator James Inhofe's family went to the time and trouble to build a little igloo on the National Mall for our amusement.
But here's a question: just what has the weather been like in other places-for example, in my part of the world...or in the Senator's home State of Oklahoma?
It's a good question-and the Senator won't like the answer.
Check out the most recent issue of the journal Science which takes a look at ways to improve food security as the world's population is expected to top 9 billion by 2050. To best nourish both people and the planet, the journal suggests a rounded approach to a worldwide agricultural revolution by encouraging diets and policies that emphasize local and sustainable food production, along with the implementation of agricultural techniques that utilize biotechnology and ecologically friendly farming solutions.
Climate skeptics found plenty of reasons to dig out their dreary critiques this week, between the continuing controversy over erroneous reports from the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the record-breaking snowfall on the East Coast. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and his family built an igloo which Inhofe then dubbed "Al Gore's house" in the streets of Washington, D.C. The Virginia GOP ran ads attacking the state's Democratic representatives for their support of cap-and-trade and urged voters to "tell them how much global warming you get this weekend." And skeptics across the world claimed that the smaller mistakes in IPCC reports undermined the organization's broad conclusions on climate change science.
Let's plow through this slushy thinking before it piles up too high.
Snow still happens in a warming world
In the winter, it snows, and one snowstorm does not overthrow all of climate science. "Perhaps it's time for a refresher," wrote Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones. "'Weather' and 'climate' are not the same thing. Weather is what happened yesterday or may happen tomorrow; climate patterns occur over decades."
"We can absolutely expect climate change to bring blizzards in places that don't normally see a lot of blizzards, like Washington, D.C.," chimes in Jonathan Hiskes at Grist. "Climatologists expect just this sort of 'global weirding': less predictable, more extreme, more damaging."
Cold temperatures, even record lows, do not contradict the extensive body of evidence that global temperatures are rising. As Hiskes points out, erratic weather patterns support climate change theories, and the coming seasons will feature more newsworthy weather events. Chalk up the snowfall that shut down the federal government for almost a week as a bad sign, akin to harsh storms like Hurricane Katrina.
Climate science stands despite IPCC errors...
The IPCC messed up. The international organization is meant to gather and review the body of climate change science and produce definitive reports on that field. But in past reports, the organization included a few facts unsupported by real scientific research. Mother Jones' Sheppard runs down these mistakes: the IPCC cannot back up its claims about the rising sea-level in Holland, crop failure in Africa, and the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
The bottom line, though, is that these errors do not affect the reports' main conclusions. As Sheppard explains, "The controversies over the IPCC's data haven't challenged the fundamental agreement among the vast majority of scientific bodies that climate change is happening and caused in large part by human activity."
...but that does not excuse the IPCC's behavior
The IPCC cannot use that broad consensus as a defense, however. The organization needs to maintain both an impeccable reputation as a scientific body and its independence from political pressures. At The Nation, Maria Margaronis argues that in the climate arena, science and politics have been wedged too closely together.
"On a subject as politicized as this, it's not surprising that scientists have been found guilty of hoarding data, smoothing a graph or two, shutting each other's work out of peer-reviewed journals," she writes. "The same goes on in far less controversial fields, where what's at stake is only money and careers. ... Every research paper and data set produced by climate scientists or cited by the IPCC is now fair game for the fine-toothed comb, whether it's wielded honestly or with malicious intent. Nit-picking takes the place of conversation."
Margaronis suggests that scientists admit to uncertainties and open up their data, while the rest of us stop looking to them as unimpeachable oracles on climate change. But as long as skeptics jump on a researcher's every doubt as a refutation of all climate science, that's not likely to happen.
Brace for impact
Negative attitudes about the IPCC and the snow are not idle threats to climate reform. As Steve Benen writes at The Washington Monthly, "It seems mind-numbing, but Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) said snowfall in D.C. has had an effect on policymakers' attitudes."
As cheap as they are, stunts like Inhofe's seem to dampen lawmakers' political will to pass real climate change legislation. Apparently, the Senate, already tip-toeing away from the cap-and-trade provisions passed in the House, can't talk about global warming when there's snow on the ground.
Foot-dragging like this costs the United States money and credibility. Administration officials are already downplaying expectations for the next international conference on climate change, to be held next winter in Mexico. And if the Senate gives up on a comprehensive climate bill and passes a weaker provision, the country will ultimately pay the price in higher deficits.
At Grist, David Roberts declares, "Good climate policy is responsible fiscal policy." His evidence? Reports from the Congressional Budget Office. The Senate's comprehensive climate legislation (known as the Kerry-Boxer bill) knocks $21 billion a year off the deficit, according to the CBO. The watered-down alternative increases the deficit by $13 billion a year.
Encounters with the arch-skeptic
Citing snowfall as an argument against global warming-and against passing climate change legislation!-is not the only half-baked idea climate skeptics throw around. As Joshua Frank notes for AlterNet, "There are usually a range of issues these skeptics raise in an attempt to cast doubt on climate change evidence." Frank offers a primer of responses to common complaints-i.e. humans don't contribute to global warming, that carbon emissions aren't to blame, either, that climate science cannot accurately measure global warming.
Keep this resources handy. It only takes one event, like this week's snow storm, for those misguided arguments to surface.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The prospects for achieving comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year, let alone a bill with enough teeth to cut climate-warming pollution in a serious way and tip the playing field toward clean energy, have dimmed considerably over the past few weeks. But other legislative opportunities are cropping up that hold keys to getting our country's response to the climate crisis on track.
The declining momentum for comprehensive climate and energy legislation is not surprising, considering the diminished resolve among Senate Democrats do anything big. Increasing numbers of Democratic senators have indicated that they would be comfortable running for the hills and passing an "energy-only" bill -- in other words a modest bill that lacks a cap on carbon pollution and contains industry-friendly policies. This approach resembles that taken in energy bills passed during the Bush administration. If senators decide they want to move in this direction, they've got a place to start. A polluter-friendly energy-only bill passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June.
President Obama offered only tepid pushback against such inclinations last week. And while Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the key Republican working with Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to craft a comprehensive bill, albeit a compromise one (e.g. one with more nuclear and offshore drilling), has said he is not ready to settle for a "half-assed" energy-only fallback, this is not very reassuring. Sen. Graham has indicated that one of his intentions in working with Democrats is to craft a bill that's even friendlier to corporate polluters than other, already polluter-friendly proposals.
While frustrating, the dismal prospects for achieving strong legislation this year need not forestall progress in the fight against global warming. There are other pressure points around which progressives can mobilize, not only to propel our country down a path to clean energy, but also to help crash the party polluting corporations have thrown with funds from our federal treasury. These include ending billions in subsidies to fossil fuel industries and stopping an expanded taxpayer bailout of the nuclear industry.
Nuclear power, biofuels, clean coal: These are the Obama administration's answers to climate change. The 2011 budget, released this week, promised new loans for the construction of nuclear power plants, and on Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), White House, and other departments detailed steps to encourage ethanol and clean coal production.
These initiatives may garner support from conservatives, but their ascendancy comes at a price. Support for renewable fuel sources, like wind and solar, has dwindled. President Barack Obama did encourage Senate Democrats to pass a climate change bill, but some moderates are bucking the cap-and-trade provisions that could tamp down carbon emissions. Those moderates are pushing for legislation that leaves carbon caps out entirely.
It hasn't been a good week for climate advocates. On top of the Obama administration's overtures to crusty, old energy industries, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has had to fend off pressure to resign. The IPCC published a report with a badly sourced fact about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting, and when scientists pointed out the error, Pachauri would not cop to the mistake. (If you missed the beginning of this to-do, Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard covered the controversy back in January.)
Given this country's weak efforts to tamp down carbon emissions, though, perhaps the IPCC's prediction that those glaciers likely will disappeared by 2035 will turn out to be accurate.
New nuclear plants-but at what cost?
Obama's budget, as Sheppard reports at Mother Jones, is upping funding for nuclear plant development, even though previous nuclear projects have run wildly over budget. The president has always supported increased nuclear production. As an Illinois Senator, Obama had Exelon Corporation, the country's largest nuclear operator, in his constituency. The company continued to support him as a presidential candidate. The proposed funding runs in the neighborhood of $54.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear projects. That's good news for an industry that's in need of cash. As Sheppard explains, without governmental backing, these plants would have little chance of being built.
"Even as public opinion toward nuclear power has warmed, projected construction costs for new plants have soared, with a single reactor now estimated to cost as much as $12 billion," she writes. "In fact, the outlook for nuclear plants looks so dire that even Wall Street banks have balked at financing them unless the government underwrites the deal."
The Obama administration is also backing research into nuclear waste disposal, a prerequisite for nuclear expansion. No matter how "green" nuclear energy production might be, so far there's no safe, sustainable way to deal with its by-products. Finding a long-term solution for nuclear waste disposal will not come cheaply.
Biofuels move us backwards
The administration's support for biofuels was bigger slap in the face to environmentalists, though. Just a few years ago, ethanol made from corn or switchgrass ranked high on the list of renewable fuels that could spring America from its Middle East oil addiction. In practice, however, biofuels have proven more environmentally destructive and less efficient than advocates had hoped. With farmers in the Midwest knee-deep in corn marked for ethanol production, though, backing away from biofuels is politically dicey.
The consequences are more than political, however. At Grist, Tom Philpott argues that support for biofuels will ultimately drive global carbon emission up, rather than down.
"As ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions," Philpott writes. "That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol."
It's not just corn and switchgrass that pose a problem, either. As Gina Marie Cheeseman reports at Care2, algae farms, another potential source of biofuel, face their own challenges. Algae demands high energy input and could release more carbon dioxide emissions that it would save, according to a new report from the University of Virginia.
There's more research to be done before writing algae energy production off, however. In January, the Department of Energy said it would sink $44 million into work on algae pools. Industry players like ExxonMobile are also underwriting research on the subject, Cheeseman writes.
No room for innovation
Moving towards energy sources like nuclear power and ethanol does take the country a step closer to responsible energy production. But right now, the Obama administration is not leaving room for new or ambitious ideas that could do more. Wind and solar, which would form the best foundation for a sustainable energy future, have few advocates in Congress. They also seem to have no role in the near-term energy plan.
Ethanol was the Midwest's first green industry, for instance, but there are other possibilities for juicing up the region's clean energy production. In The Nation, Lisa Margonelli lays out the case for "gray power," which is recycled energy produced by the old, dirty smokestacks that ring cities like Cleveland.
In this vision, twentieth century industry can produce twenty-first century energy. Waste energy, Margonelli argues, "can be profitably "recycled" onto the grid to create power as clean as that from solar and wind but far cheaper."
"In fact, energy now lost as steam and gases by the region's manufacturing plants, as well as municipal and agricultural waste, could create as much energy as sixty-nine nuclear power plants, according to figures commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency," she says. "This power could strengthen the region's electrical grid and preserve jobs by making local manufacturing plants more economically stable, while making the region a leader in greener technology."
A project like Margonelli imagines, however, would require significant commitment and vision from the federal government, both of which are lacking right now.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
McDonald's is hoping to change the way consumers view fast food. In partnership with the E-CO2 Project, an independent U.K. consulting firm, the company is launching a three-year study to assess methane production from beef cows in the United Kingdom, as well as ways to reduce livestock production of the greenhouse gas.
A burger joint famous for drive-thru windows and Happy Meals is certainly not the first business that comes to mind when one thinks about environmental sustainability. But with increasing mainstream awareness of the negative consequences of beef production for both human health and the environment, the fast-food giant is looking to reposition itself as leader of green business models.
McDonald's purchases beef from more than 16,000 British and Irish farmers, who raise their cattle in large feedlots. The methane gas produced by livestock accounts for an estimated 4 percent of the U.K.'s total carbon emissions. McDonald's hopes that the results of the study will help guide efforts to reduce suppliers' methane production. The initiative also will likely help "green" the corporation's image in the minds of an increasingly environmentally conscious public.
Global warming denialism reached a fever pitch this last year, with pathological liar George Will leading the way, thanks to a high-profile platform with the mendacious Washington Post. Back in March, I added my voice to the mix:
George Will , Washington Post: Traitors To Humanity
January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.
But now, NASA has announced that 2009 was tied for the second hottest year ever recorded, and the 2000s were the hottest decade. It's not even close to being close:
[Author's calculations from NASA data]
This chart of decadal averages filters out a great deal of the year-to-year noise that global warming deniers--George Will one of the most prominent among them--have tried to use to confuse matters. But there was never really any doubt, as one can see from the chart I included in my March post, just below the passage I quoted above:
No rational person can pretend that there's any doubt about global warming. It's way too late for that. By now it's clear that the "let's hear both sides" crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.
As a background to a jobs bill and the financial regulation package, health insurance reform will drag on for several more weeks, and might never be passed.
As a result of that, climate change legislation is on life support, and will likely be shelved (and even the back-up plan of using the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses might be shelved).
And, as a result of those delays, immigration reform is almost certainly off the table for 2010.
In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.
The Obama administration's attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall.
Obama did address global warming skeptics, saying that they should support investment in clean energy, "because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."
Despite his combative language, the president did not challenge Congress to push for real solutions to ballooning carbon emissions and energy consumption. As Forrest Wilder of The Texas Observer notes, Obama "uttered the phrase 'climate change' precisely once."
The Senate has already wait-listed the climate bill: Health care came first. With health care reform now in line behind work on jobs and bank regulation, climate legislation has little chance of passing the Senate in the coming months, let alone making it to the president's desk.
If Congress lets this work wait until after the midterm elections, the United States will show up at international negotiations in December 2010 as a leader in carbon emissions yet again, but with little in hand to show a way forward.
Clean energy, not renewable energy
When the president did bring up climate issues, he focused on their connection between climate reform and potential job creation. Obama highlighted areas for growth, not in renewable energy fields like wind or solar power, but in nuclear power, natural gas, and clean coal.
Yes, these fuel sources could decrease the country's carbon emissions. But they are not solutions that will revolutionize energy production. Grist's David Roberts was floored that the speech omitted renewable energy entirely and kowtowed to a more conservative litany of energy projects. "I suppose it was done to flatter conservative Senators that will have to vote for the bill Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are working on," he writes. (The three Senators are working on a version of the climate bill designed to appeal to Republicans.)
"But the SOTU is not a policy negotiation," Roberts says. "It's a bully pulpit, a chance to shape rather than respond to existing narratives."
Roberts argues that progressive supporters would benefit from a stronger message. If activists knew that the White House stands behind a real shift in America's energy policy, they could use that prompt to drive action on climate change.
What was missing
While touting the virtues of off-shore drilling, Obama overlooked other policies that could broker real change. Although he admonished Congress to pass a climate bill, he did not pressure the legislature on what he'd like that bill to include. He did not mention cap-and-trade, the mechanism the House bill relies on to tamp down emissions and dirty energy use.
President Obama did touch on transportation reforms that could decrease the country's use of fossil fuels.
"There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains," Obama said. He cited a high-speed rail project that broke ground on Tuesday in Tampa, FL, as evidence that America could best the rest of the world in creating new energy-efficient technology.
But one or two high-profile projects won't be enough to challenge Europe's network of high-speed trains or China's investments in solar power. The White House could put the country at the forefront of sustainable technologies, but it'll take more money than the president has committed. In AlterNet's ideal state of the union, projects like the railway would merit sustained attention and funding. Funding for the high-speed train came from this year's stimulus bill, and there's no guarantee that similar projects will find federal funding in the future.
"Continued support is still needed" for green jobs and clean energy, Alternet's editorial staff argues. "It's unclear yet how Obama's new proposal for a three-year spending freeze will apply to this sector, but a boost is what is needed, not cuts."
Green jobs
Michelle Chen argues for In These Times that the president is right to subordinate climate issues to economic policy. "The jobs angle is more than sugar-coating," she says. A recent Pew Research Center poll put climate change at the end of Americans' long list of cares, and a Brookings Institution study found that they're no longer willing to pay as much for greener products.
Jobless workers need green in their pockets most of all, and so far politicians' promises haven't made up for the slack economy.
"No matter how slick the marketing, confidence in green jobs may wilt even further absent real investments in the beleaguered blue-collar workforce," Chen writes.
Copenhagen accord losing momentum
The small role that climate change played in the state of the union address only emphasized the downward momentum of the issue since the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen. Grist's Jonathan Hiskes talked to six leaders in climate change activism, and none of them offered a different strategy than they had last year.
That same stasis is showing up in Europe, as well. Spain, which currently leads the European Union, proposed that the European Union's negotiating position should remain the same as its position before the Copenhagen conference, according to Inter Press Service.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who's working on climate change legislation in the Senate, offered advice to climate activists at a clean energy forum in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports that Sen. Kerry encouraged his audience to get angrier, louder, and more active, in the mode of the conservative Tea Partiers, who have earned plenty of attention. After his speech, he also recalled the tactics that pushed landmark legislation like the Clean Air Act through Congress.
If climate change is going to play a larger role in the next state of the union, the citizens and groups concerned about this issue need to do something to put it on the agenda. Otherwise, next year, the president may find it just as easy to skim over it again.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
For half the world's population, every meal depends on an open fire that is fueled by wood, coal, dung, and other smoke-producing combustibles. These indoor cookfires consume large amounts of fuel and emit carbon dioxide and other dangerous toxins into the air, blackening the insides of homes and leading to respiratory diseases, especially among women and children.
Biogas, however, takes advantage of what is typically considered waste, providing a cleaner and safer source of energy. Biogas units use methane from manure to produce electricity, heat, and fertilizer while emitting significantly less smoke and carbon monoxide than other sources of fuel. Access to an efficient, clean-burning stove not only saves lives-smoke inhalation-related illnesses result in 1.5 million deaths per year-it also reduces the amount of time that women spend gathering firewood, which the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimates is 10 hours per week for the average household in some rural areas.
The IFAD-funded Gash Barka Livestock and Agricultural Development Project (GBLADP) helped one farmer in Eritrea, Tekie Mekerka, make the most of the manure his 30 cows produce by helping to install a biogas unit on his farm (similar to the unit that Danielle saw in Rwanda with Heifer International). Now, says Mekerka, "we no longer have to go out to collect wood for cooking, the kitchen is now smoke-free, and the children can study at night because we have electricity."Additionally, Mekerka is using the organic residue left by the biogas process as fertilizer for his family's new vegetable garden.
In Rwanda, the government is making biogas stove units more accessible by subsidizing installation costs, and it hopes to have 15,000 households nationwide using biogas by 2012. While visiting with Heifer Rwanda, Danielle met Madame Helen Bahikwe, who, after receiving government help to purchase her biogas unit, is now more easily cooking for her 10-person family and improving hygiene on the farm with hot water for cleaning.
In China, IFAD found that biogas saved farmers so much time collecting firewood that farm production increased. In Tanzania, the Foundation for Sustainable Rural Development (SURUDE), with funding from UNDP, found that each biogas unit used in their study reduced deforestation by 37 hectares per year. And in Nigeria, on a much larger scale, methane and carbon dioxide produced by a water purifying plant is now being used to provide more affordable gas to 5,400 families a month, thanks to one of the largest biogas installations in Africa.
If you know of other ways people are making the most of their waste and would like to share it with us, we encourage you to leave a comment or fill out our agriculture innovation survey here.
A recent change of the guard in the Massachusetts Senate race force the President to reveal he is working. We, the American people, are waiting, just as we have been for months and months. For a full year, countless citizens have felt as though they were patient. Yet, the President did not seem to have their interests at heart. True change has not come. Countless constituents anticipate none is forthcoming. Three hundred and sixty five plus have gone by and the American people are tired of being patient.
On Thursday afternoon, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) pulled out a rarely-used Congressional tool in an attempt to keep the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating carbon and other greenhouse gasses. Sen. Murkowski offered a "resolution of disapproval" of the EPA's impending action, which would limit companies' carbon emissions.
The resolution would overturn the EPA's finding that carbon dioxide is harmful to the public health. Three Democrats-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)-joined Sen. Murkowski and 35 Republicans in sponsoring the resolution.
"Ms. Murkowski's Mischief'"
"This command and control approach is our worst option for reducing the gasses associated with climate change," said Sen. Murkowski on the floor of the Senate yesterday. She called the EPA's actions "backdoor climate regulations with no input from Congress" and said they would damage the country's flailing economy.
The EPA first announced in April 2009 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses posed a threat to the public health. The agency formalized that finding last month, giving itself the power to regulate emissions of greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. In March 2010, for instance, the agency is expected to announce carbon emissions rules for the auto industry that would match California's higher standards. Sen. Murkowski's resolution would derail that process.
Sen. Murkowski argued that she wants to give Congress room to come up with a legislative solution to climate change, but her critics see a more dangerous tilt to her resolution. "It's a radical attempt by the legislative branch to interfere with executive branch scientists," writes David Roberts at Grist.
Responding to "Ms. Murskowski's mischief" on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called the resolution an "unprecedented effort to overturn scientific decision" and "a direct assault on the health of the American people."
Resolution of disapproval
What is a "resolution of disapproval?" Grist's Roberts called it "the nuclear option."
"It would rescind the EPA's endangerment finding entirely and thereby eliminate its authority over both mobile and stationary sources," Roberts explains. "Furthermore, the administration would be prohibited from passing a regulation "substantially the same" as the one overruled, so the constraint on the EPA would effectively be permanent."
This type of resolution was created by the Clinton-era Congressional Reform Act. The resolution has one big advantage: It cannot be filibustered. Passage requires only a majority in both houses of Congress. Members have tried using it in the past to delay the Dubai Ports World deal, derail FCC regulations on new media, and stop the flow of bailout funds.
Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones has been following Sen. Murkowski's actions closely. She reports that "Senate supporters of climate action say Murkowski could obtain the votes of moderate Democrats from coal, oil, and manufacturing states. However, a resolution would still need to be approved by the House and signed by the president-both long shots, to put it mildly. 'I think we're a little worried about [Murkowski's resolution] winning. I'm not sure we're worried about it becoming law,' a Senate Democratic staffer says."
But Grist's Roberts argues that passage in the Senate alone would be a problem. "Even if blocked by the House or vetoed by the president, such a public, bipartisan slap at the administration would be highly embarrassing and demoralizing," Roberts writes. "It would mean at least ten conservative Democrats washing their hands of the administration's initiative."
Climate change and Congress
Sen. Murkowski insists that she's still ready to work with her colleagues on climate change and that it's better to approach the problem of climate change via legislation, not regulation.
But no one in Washington believes that climate change legislation is going to pass-even come to the Senate floor-any time soon. The issue was already in line behind health care, and the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to Sen. Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat this week means that none of the bills that the Senate is working on are likely to come to a vote this year.
"There was hope that the [climate] bill would come to the floor in the spring," writes Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. "Regrettably, a narrow majority of Massachusetts voters have made it significantly more likely that Congress won't address the problem at all. Proponents focused on solutions have vowed to "persist," but Massachusetts has made a difficult situation considerably worse."
The role of special interests
Sen. Murkowski has come under criticism for allowing Bush-era EPA administrators, now lobbyists representing clients on climate change issues, to help her craft an earlier amendment cracking down on the EPA. Yesterday, she said that those criticisms are "categorically false."
But as JP Leous reports at Care2, Sen. Murkowski does receive substantial backing from energy industries that oppose climate change legislation and regulation.
"According to OpenSecrets.org Sen. Murkowski has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from polluting companies, and some of her biggest campaign contributors in recent years include firms with fossil-fueled motives like Exxon Mobil Corp," Leous writes "Add those dots into the mix and a different picture emerges - and it starts to look like a person who is poised to introduce legislation next week attacking the Clean Air Act."
On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Boxer charged, "Why would the Senate get in the business of repealing science? Because that's what the special interests want to have happen now. Because they're desperate."
The Democratic Senators who co-sponsored the resolution also come from energy producing states where companies object to the new EPA regulations.
If at first you don't succeed...
If Sen. Murkowski's resolution does pass the Senate, there's little chance it will pass the House as well. But this isn't the only option that regulation opponents are looking at to fight the EPA. The Chamber of Commerce and other groups are planning to challenge the regulatory action in court, as Mother Jones' Sheppard reports.
Last week, these opponents met to discuss their strategy. What's interesting, Sheppard says, is that "the group was apparently divided on the best course of action. The Hill observes that "two camps have emerged." One wants to challenge whatever rules the EPA issues, while another wants to question the science of global warming itself."
We're back to that old saw? With legislation off the table, the fight over climate change, for now, is in the regulatory arena.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
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[Author's calculations from NASA data]
For half the world's population, every meal depends on an open fire that is fueled by wood, coal, dung, and other smoke-producing combustibles. These indoor cookfires consume large amounts of fuel and emit carbon dioxide and other dangerous toxins into the air, blackening the insides of homes and leading to respiratory diseases, especially among women and children.
