Polluters' War on Climate Legislation Is Taking a Toll

The war over climate legislation in Congress is revealing just how far vested interests will twist the truth to protect their profits.

Ad campaigns are flooding television and radio, attacking supporters of the climate bill, claiming clean energy at home will ship jobs overseas, and even citing the same debunked cost estimates that an MIT author has repeatedly knocked down as "wrong in so many ways."

At the same time, the fossil fuels and energy industries are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying efforts and campaign contributions, and their politicians are busy hitting the media with fear mongering and occasionally bizarre arguments.

Take this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:

"Quite simply, it looks like imperialism. This bill would impose enormous taxes and restrictions on free commerce by wealthy but faltering powers – California, Massachusetts and New York – seeking to exploit politically weaker colonies in order to prop up their own decaying economies. Because proceeds from their new taxes, levied mostly on us, will be spent on their social programs while negatively impacting our economy, we Hoosiers decline to submit meekly."

Or this comment yesterday from Texas Rep. Joe Barton, who has promised that his Republican colleagues will flood the House Energy and Commerce Committee with
scores of amendments to continue watering down the bill:

"We'll see which of us has the other by the nuts next week."

At the vortex is a group of about a dozen key coal- and industry-state Democrats on the energy committee who could make or break the climate bill as it goes through markup over the next two weeks.

These Democrats, including Rick Boucher of Virginia, Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, and John Dingell of Michigan, have been busy extracting their own concessions for local industries, and stripping the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) to its bones.

The ACES bill that was formally introduced today still has a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions, and it still has a renewable energy standard. But the changes slash the targets for both and offer polluters a huge number free allowances that would have all been auctioned off. That rather defeats the purpose, as Republican Rep. Jeff Flake explained to McClatchy yesterday after he proposed a carbon tax bill:

"The first axiom of economics is if you want less of something, you tax it,” Flake said. “Obviously, we want less carbon, so we tax it."

When Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey proposed the ACES bill, they started with a compromise intended to win over Congress’s coal and industrial-state Democrats – it was a centrist, pre-negotiated bill based on a proposal by the industries and environmental groups that make up the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.

That wasn’t enough for the nation’s deep-pocketed polluters, though. They wanted more and still do, so they ratcheted up the pressure on their congressmen to demand more concessions or make sure it never leaves the committee.