Young Advocates Call for Framing Shift on Waxman Bill

At 648 pages, the Waxman-Markey climate bill is a literal behemoth. But the endless page-count and dry legal jargon isn’t stopping young climate advocates who recognize the potential for movement in Washington now and want the best legislation.

The minute the discussion draft was released last month, policy groups and citizen journalists alike began gnawing through the immense document, finding the weak and strong points, and coming out with compelling analyses and demands for lawmakers in Washington.

Young people have been less than thrilled with what they’ve found, and they’re not shy about saying so.

To get a handle on what they're thinking, and how their congressional “asks” differ from colleagues one generation removed, I talked with a number of young climate policy experts intimately familiar with the Waxman-Markey legislation. I wanted to understand their take on the bill, the political war-zone it has to fight through, and where they see young people contributing in the policy debate.

They want carbon dollars flowing into clean tech RDD&D, green jobs corps, and a portion into citizen’s hands to counter persistent Republican tantrums about increased energy costs (which GOP leaders shamefully exaggerated earlier this month).

What they don’t want is money and policy perks flowing to float the dirty energy industry – and they’re outraged that the bill is chalk full of them.

Fundamentally, they’re calling for a complete reframing of the climate debate, in two major ways.

The first deals with rhetoric around the cost of the policy. When Republicans say, “It costs too much,” and Democrats respond with, “We’ll make it cost less,” they’ve already lost the argument. The debate needs to be around “how much it can help” – how much will it stimulate the economy, how many jobs will it create, how secure will it make us, etc. And inversely – how much will a weak bill, or inaction, cost us?

The second framing critique deals with the climate movement’s unfortunately schizophrenic disconnect between our messaging and our policy prescription.

For years, we’ve been hammering the following point: climate change = red alert global catastrophe, it threatens all life on Earth and the future habitability of our planet. Yet our policy solution is nowhere near the red alert level, it lies somewhere between Velveeta cheese and Taco Bell hot sauce in terms of punch.

By asking for slow-moving emissions reductions targets far into the future, we’re sending a completely inappropriate and ultimately disempowering message for our cause – that solving climate change isn’t urgent, we’ll deal with it sometime later, and it won’t require much change from the status quo since we’ll transition so gradually. Two percent reductions per year – easy, right?

Wrong, say young advocates, whose personal future is at stake. We’ve got to go full steam ahead and transition off carbon fuels as fast as possible, with our goal not 80% by 2050 but “maximum effort”, as Holmes Hummel likes to describe. And because this bill appears to be our only shot at climate legislation this year, youth are in no position to compromise.

I’ll let their stories speak for themselves.

Jesse Jenkins, 25, is director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute. He’s been shouting the weak points of the bill over public radio and on web, and fears that without a clear focus on where the carbon dollars are going, the legislation will be prone to Republican attacks.