Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has proclaimed climate
legislation
dead for the rest of this year (although some are
suspicious about a potential
lame duck session in November or December), and
environmental pressure groups are blowing off steam over their
political failures.
But why complain? They’ve got the command-and-control
system of (fossil fuel) energy regulation they wanted, thanks to
the EPA’s
endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act that
enables it to regulate greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and
others) from vehicles, utilities and industry. Sure,
it’s being challenged in administrative appeals
and courts, but the statist system has been approved and assembly
is underway. Those invisible emissions will be policed.
Nevertheless the Greens lament, as exemplified by activist
Bill
McKibben last week
in a commentary picked up by CBSNews.com:
… In late July, the U.S. Senate
decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t
do less than they could have — they
did nothing,
preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule
a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon
emissions.
I wrote the first book for a general audience on
global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21
years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a
Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I
want to say is: this is messed up. The time has come to get
mad, and then to get busy.
The
delusional McKibben went on to sincerely commend
“corporate and moderate” groups like the Environmental Defense
Fund for doing “everything the way you’re
supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and
compromised at every turn.” He then summed up with:
By the time they were done, they had a bill that
only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not
factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry
that if you listened closely you could actually hear the
oinking….
They were left out to dry by everyone — not just
Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn’t
lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in
the fight.
The result: total defeat, no moral
victories.
That last point was like a dagger for both the White House
and those “corporate” environmental groups (hello,
Fred Krupp), who immediately turned on one another
with
blamethrowers, as Politico
reported:
After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
last month scrapped plans for a vote, the White House made
clear it wasn’t impressed with the environmentalists’
effort.
“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” an
administration official told POLITICO just hours after Reid
pulled the plug on the climate bill. “They spent like $100
million, and they weren’t able to get a single Republican
convert on the bill….”
Enraged environmentalists flooded the White House
with phone calls after the quotation appeared in publication.
Publicly, they decried the finger pointing and insisted they
aren’t alone in deserving fault, saying Obama failed to use
his bully pulpit and moderate Senate Republicans weren’t allowed
by their leaders to fully negotiate.
True, if you limit the scope to Congress, the hundreds of
millions of dollars poured into lobbying and campaigns by
environoia groups (are they really outgunned by
Big
Oil?) achieved very little. But when the eco-gogues
got that EPA dictate based on
a Supreme Court order (thanks,
Blue America), they should have celebrated.
Unless, of course, it wasn’t the emission reductions and
resulting climate effect they wanted as much as
cap-and-trade.
This seems to be the case. In the words
of the corporately
environmentalist members of the
U.S. Climate Action Partnership, “cap and trade is
essential.” The business end of that collaboration (General
Electric, Duke Energy, Exelon, etc.) joined the likes of
Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council so as
to find ways to collect “climate
revenues” from such a scheme. But if there’s no
scheme, there are no revenues.
It also explains the dejected Congressmen who had hoped for
a carbon trading market of their making, in which they’d decide
which industries get the pollution permits to sell and trade. It
held so much promise for favors and donor potential. Now,
poof!
As for the downcast countenances on alarmists like McKibben
and Kevin Knobloch (“My
sense is we did fail”), president of the Union
of Scientists Concerned About Their Grant Funding, the
sadness that they lost cap-and-trade — even though they have EPA
regulation in hand — means they really don’t care about the
global thermostat. It’s all about money, and raising more of it
for their multi-million-dollar nonprofits. They sold their
wealthy donors on a legislative goal of cap-and-trade, and fell
short.
“There was an expectation in the environmental
community that [political] leadership would deliver a certain
amount of votes,” said EDF spokesman Tony Kreindler. “But there
never was a clear understanding of how those two efforts would
work together.”
Meanwhile, McKibben
is issuing new strategies for
a different Eaarth: “The task
at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone —
beginning with the president — to start explaining that basic
fact at every turn.”
Good
luck with
that, Bill.
