We Need an 'Emergency Mobilization' to Fight Climate Change: So Where's the Support for the Kerry-Lieberman Bill?

With global temperatures continuing their relentless climb upward (this past April was the hottest on record, according to NOAA and NASA), environmentalists say we need nothing short of a World War II-style “emergency mobilization” to address the threat of climate change.

Well, then, where’s the mobilizing?

In the nearly two weeks since Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman unveiled their comprehensive climate legislation, green groups’ efforts to shape and pass the American Power Act have fallen short of what I would consider an “emergency” effort. Distracted by the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, forced to play defense to halt Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski’s effort to weaken the EPA, and handicapped by the public's  through-the-looking-glass understanding of global warming, the environmental movement is showing itself unable — or unwilling — to flex the muscle needed to pass the legislation.

The Senate climate bill represents a major test of the environmental organizations' political strength. And right now, unfortunately, they’ve got a failing grade. If the green groups want to pass some sort of decent greenhouse gas regulations, they need to get their heads out of the Washington, DC echo chamber, get serious about field organizing in specific states, and focus on the senators who are considered swing votes to clear the 60 votes needed for passage. At this point, tackling global warming will require focused efforts at the local level.

In all fairness, the green lobby is in a tough position. The Deepwater Horizon blowout has, for good reason, swallowed up many organizations’ resources and staff attention. At the same time, a cynical move by Senator Murkowski of Alaska to undo the EPA’s authority over greenhouse gasses (set for a vote June 10) has pushed environmentalists into a rearguard defense. Greens have been forced to triage their priorities.

“We’re kind of juggling a couple of different priorities, between the oil disaster and this imminent vote on the Murkowski resolution,” David Willett, a spokesperson for the Sierra Club, told me last Thursday. “So this week our focus is on getting our activists to contact senators on the Murkowski resolution. … We have three number one priorities at the same time. Our main issues right now are Kerry-Lieberman, response to the oil disaster, and beating back any attempt to gut the Clean Air Act and gut the EPA authority.”

Author and influential climate blogger Joe Romm told me Friday that he’s “impressed with how the environmental and energy communities have worked so closely and with such coordination” to push for the American Power Act. But, he said, green groups’ efforts have been hamstrung by what he called “a collapse of political space.”

“It is the polluters and the anti-science crowd that have demagogued the issue to the point where a Republican solution — a market mechanism to control emissions — has become some kind of ‘liberal takeover,’” Romm told me. “There is a misperception that this is a political loser. … If there’s no bill, the fault lies 90 percent with the rigidness of the Republican Party.”

Perhaps. But I think it’s fair to say that environmental groups — despite creating an impressive coalition of veterans, religious leaders, and labor unions to support the legislation — hold some of the responsibility for failing to make climate and energy a political winner. Senators are simply not feeling any heat from their constituents when it comes to global warming.