Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

The climate bill is dead.

Don't believe me?  Here's what Carol Browner, the president's Climate Czar, said in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine:

"What is abundantly clear is that an economy-wide program, which the president has talked about for years now, is not doable in the Senate."

Not doable in the senate.  That phraseology is clearly designed to pass the blame onto the senate and to absolve the president from responsibility for inaction.  But his former supporters ain't buyin' it:

But the failure to confront global warming – central not only to Obama's presidency but to the planet itself – is not the Senate's alone. Rather than press forward with a climate bill in the Senate last summer, after the House had passed landmark legislation to curb carbon pollution, the administration repeated many of the same mistakes it made in pushing for health care reform. It refused to lay out its own plan, allowing the Senate to bicker endlessly over the details. It pursued a "stealth strategy" of backroom negotiations, supporting huge new subsidies to win over big polluters. It allowed opponents to use scare phrases like "cap and tax" to hijack public debate. And most galling of all, it has failed to use the gravest environmental disaster in the nation's history to push through a climate bill – to argue that fossil-fuel polluters should pay for the damage they are doing to the atmosphere, just as BP will be forced to pay for the damage it has done to the Gulf.

What happened to hope and change?  What has happened this transformative administration who was finally going to take action to combat climate change?

...Obama, so far, has shown no urgency on the issue, and little willingness to lead – despite a June poll showing that 76 percent of Americans believe the government should limit climate pollution. With hopes for an economy-wide approach to global warming dashed, Congress is now weighing a scaled-back proposal that would ratchet down carbon pollution from the nation's electric utilities. It has come to this: The best legislation we can hope for is the same climate policy that George W. Bush promoted during the 2000 campaign. Even worse, the "utilities first" approach could wind up stripping the EPA of its newfound authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

Now readers, don't misinterpret our glee (or schadenfreude?); We are glad as can be that the president is not forcing down our throats a foolhardy climate bill that would have no real effect on the climate but would stagnate the American economy.

But this sort of article is also an indicator that even the most liberal voters are dissatisfied with both the administration and congress.  Indeed, in the latest Gallup poll, an astonishing 11% of respondents expressed confidence in Congress.  And the confidence rating in the president has dropped from 52% in June of 2009 to just 36% this month.

Does that dissatisfaction mean we'll see a landslide of liberal voters supporting conservative candidates?  Probably not.  But we may see disenchanted liberal voters stay at home, while independent voters will break heavily for those who support fiscal sanity and realism in the climate debate.  That would go a long way towards averting the disaster of a climate bill - a disaster that seemed inevitable just 18 months ago.

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Patrick Gallagher, Editor

Most Egregious Claim of the Week

From Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers:

Apparently, when Russians get drunk and drown, it's really global warming's fault.

-Patrick Gallagher, Editor