senate

Massachusetts voters go to the polls today to elect a replacement for the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, and the outcome could have serious implications for climate legislation.

This election will make or break the Democrats’ current 60-vote majority in the Senate, which is just enough right now to end a Republican filibuster. Much of the national discussion centers on the health care bill, which Republican candidate Scott Brown opposes. But a Republican victory also would likely mean defeat for cap-and-trade legislation this year.

The U.S. got its first glimpse of the future Senate climate bill today as Democrat John Kerry and Republican Lindsey Graham outlined a compromise plan that fully embraces nuclear power, off-shore drilling, "clean coal" and cap-and-trade.

The framework echoes the House's 17 percent mid-term emissions cut, rather than the tougher 20 percent cut approved by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It also seeks to shield agriculture from the impact of a price on emissions.

Right now, the framework is still just that, a sparse framework. The details will come later as various Senate committees combine their bills with those already passed by the Environment and Public Works and Energy and Natural Resources committees.

What the framework does, Kerry said, is lead the way toward “comprehensive climate change and energy legislation that will pass the Senate early next year.”

The national debate over offshore oil drilling picked up again today at a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Though discussion wasn't as heated as in the '08 Presidential campaign that saw the Republican Party rally around the "Drill, Baby, Drill" slogan, the trade-offs Senators are going to have to weigh when settling national policy were put on full view.

The Committee passed its portion of the climate bill in June, and it included an amendment that would allow drilling for oil as close as 45 miles from Florida’s Gulf Coast – and even closer in the Destin Dome area off Pensacola.

Sens. Lindsey Graham, John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, working on a climate bill proposal of their own, see increased offshore drilling as a necessary compromise for securing passage of a climate law that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  

Today's hearings were called to address concerns raised last June on the environmental impacts of offshore development.

“Access to the vast resources of the OCS [outer continental shelf] is critical; we need it and it’s good for this country,” Shell president Marvin Odum argued at the time.

But many senators and organizations remain far from convinced that tells the whole story.

The Senate launched a marathon week of climate bill hearings this morning with strong indications from a key Democrat that the legislation will have to be watered down to gain enough votes to pass.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the influential Finance Committee, said he was concerned about the costs involved, the lack of preemption of the Clean Air Act, and the depth of the bill’s mid-term greenhouse gas reduction target — 20% below 2005 levels by 2020, compared to 17% in the House-passed version.

“Montana, with our resource-based agriculture and tourism economies, cannot afford the unmitigated effects of climate change, but we also cannot afford the unmitigated effects of climate change legislation,” Baucus told his colleagues during the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

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Now that Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have introduced their climate bill in the United States Senate, this fall will be all about the dogs. To get the 60 votes they need to pass a bill, progressive Democrats will be trying to turn Blue Dog Democrats into Green Dog Democrats.

Welcome to the dog days of autumn. Watch for progressives to offer milk bones, kibbles and bits to coax their more conservative colleagues into commitments that conscience alone should be sufficient to dictate.

The challenge for leaders in the Senate, as it was in the House, will be to prevent the climate bill from being negotiated into something far less than required to reinvent the American economy and reverse our greenhouse gas emissions, and to do both quickly.

Whether Senate leaders succeed in producing public policy that averts climate disaster will depend in large part on how they frame the debate.

Here are three suggestions:

When the House passed its version of a federal climate bill in June, lawmakers included a provision to handcuff the Environmental Protection Agency when it came to greenhouse gas emissions from the nation's biggest polluters.

Bowing to demands of coal state Democrats, lawmakers effectively agreed that the agency shall not regulate "stationary sources" for CO2 — in other words, hands off the greenhouse gases from coal plants and large industries.

Today in the Senate, those handcuffs came off. The Senate climate bill introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry made no mention of restricting EPA authority the way the House version did, and the agency wasted no time in raising both free hands in a move that put it emphatically center stage in the climate game.

Just hours after the roll-out of the Boxer-Kerry bill, EPA issued a press release explaining how it plans to control emissions from big polluters, including new power plants, by establishing common sense regulatory rules. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the details during a keynote address at the Governors' Global Climate Summit in California.

"We will not continue with business as usual while waiting for Congress to act," Jackson said from the podium.

It was the same Global Climate Summit where last November a newly-elected Barack Obama delivered a videotaped message, vowing U.S. leadership on climate change, and made instant global news.

While today's EPA announcement is not likely to be appreciated worldwide, it does provide evidence of the Obama administration's commitment to climate action ahead of international talks in Copenhagen. It is also an important regulatory development that will help determine whether the U.S. will really be able to reduce domestic industrial emissions of greenhouse gases or not.

Absent EPA authority, large loopholes and handouts in both the Senate and House versions of the climate bill will make it difficult, if not impossible, for the nation to depart from the trajectory of business as usual for decades. That's why one of the fiercest upcoming battles in the partisan war over federal climate law will be over the reach and authority of the EPA in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama advocated for a renewable electricity standard that would require utilities to obtain 25% of their power from renewable resources by 2025.

By the time the climate bill got through the U.S. House, though, the RES had been watered down to 20% by 2020, with loopholes allowing states to get away with as little as 12%, and even less if they can make carbon capture technology work. Several independent analyses and the EPA have concluded that such a tepid law would spur about as much growth in renewable energy as no federal law at all.

Now, the climate ball is in the Senate’s court, and industry, environmental and trade groups are digging in in an attempt to resuscitate the RES to its full potential as a force that can shift the energy industry's focus from coal to wind, solar and other renewable sources.

President Obama changed the tune in Washington when he ordered that all policymaking be based on sound science. But the shift from opinion- to fact-based decisionmaking still hasn’t transferred to Congress.

The problem is evident each time the House and Senate environment committees hold hearings on climate change.

In the interest of balance, the minority-party committee members have the power to invite witnesses to testify. And Republicans such as Sen. James Inhofe and Reps. Joe Barton and John Shimkus (see video) have ensured that climate change deniers without credentials in climate science testify alongside respected scientists.

The result is conflicting testimony that keeps the committee chairmen running interference as they try to clarify fact from fiction and leaves less-informed members of Congress bluntly asking: Who's lying?

Perhaps they should ask John Holdren, who was confirmed last week as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He's the president's chief science advisor, America's "scientist laureate." At a conference a few months ago, he spelled out how preposterous the views of climate change deniers are:

“Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by this vocal fringe should ask themselves how it could be, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that the leaderships of the national academies of sciences of every country in the world that has one are repeatedly on record saying that global climate change is real, dangerous, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early and concerted action to reduce those causes; that this is also the overwhelming consensus view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every major university in the world.”

“The fact is that anybody who could believe that the cream of the part of the world scientific community that has actually studied this phenomenon could be co-opted by hoaxers or suffering from mass hysteria is just not thinking clearly."

Do the 535 elected leaders in the United States Congress have what it takes to help America solve its energy and climate crises?

Apparently not. Congress flunked a crucial test on climate change earlier this year when the Senate failed to bring a cap-and-trade bill to a vote. The House hasn’t even brought a bill to the floor.

Another crucial test took place this week on a proposal to extend tax incentives for renewable energy industries. The incentives are critical to the rapid development of wind and solar systems in the United States, technologies that are essential to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But the US Senate failed to pass a key procedural vote on the incentives for the fourth time this summer, shelving the bill again. Unless Congress votes to extend them, the incentives will expire at the end of the year.

How much science does it take; how many droughts, wildfires and natural disasters; how many energy crises; how many entreaties from world leaders before Congress does the right thing?