Centrist Climate Bill Deserves Defeat

Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left at 11:26 AM on June 3, 2008.

Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions.  The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).

"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said....

"Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.

The only group to do paid media against this bill was the Friends of the Earth, who realized early on (as did most liberal bloggers discussing this issue) that the politics didn't make sense.  You can't cut the baby in half with regards to climate.  Either you tax carbon in some form and use it to build a socially just society, or you tax it and give the money to business elites, leveling the rest of the middle class in the process.  The result of the latter scenario is 'nuclear feudalism', with a superrich class and the rest of us steeped in poverty.

Lieberman-Warner was the bill that taxed carbon (through a confusing cap and trade mechanism) and gave the money to businesses.  Business elites realized a few years ago that funding the deniers was only useful as a wedge to solicit subsidies around carbon.  In other words, they were saying something along the lines of "Don't side with the crazy environmentalists, don't side with the crazy deniers, side with moderate pro-business reasonable people who agree that climate change is a problem but don't want to cost the economy money."  If that sounds like the immigration or Energy bill or war funding fiascos, you wouldn't be far off, as the architecture of those conversations is the same as the architecture of this one.

It was not a progressive bill.  But more than that, it was cooked up behind closed doors, by groups like the Sierra Club, NRDC, the Pew Charitable Trust, and Environmental Defense.  They did no real work to organize around it, with ED running ads funded by industry.  And so of course it collapsed of its own dead weight, as it should have.

Here's Boxer back in January, on the Friends of the Earth, who were proved right in their campaign to 'fix it or ditch it'.

"They're sort of the defeatist group out there," she said. "They've been defeatists from day one. And it's unfortunate. They're isolated among the environmental groups."

Yes, they were.  They were also correct, and Boxer ignored them.  Reid shouldn't bring this bill up for a vote, and if it is brought up for a vote, Democrats Senators should all vote against it.  This process has been an embarrassment for all insiders involved, and Joe Lieberman, John Warner, John McCain, Barbara Boxer, Environmental Defense's Fred Krupp, and the Natural Resources Defense Council's Frances Beinecke should be tagged with this grotesque attempt at feeding at the public trough without anyone looking.

On the bright side, climate bloggers and Friends of the Earth did make their mark, and had real influence in the debate.  There's a lot of hope for the global warming progressive space, especially going forward into this change election.  It's a bright spot that this piece of shit is going down with such a disastrous thud, and that progressives called it out early and often.