Once again, however, the administration applied the same
backroom approach it took to health care reform. Instead of
waging a public debate to pit the American people against the
corporate polluters, Obama gave the polluters a seat at the
negotiating table.
Ahem. The only public debate the president is capable of
initiating right now is to pit races
against each other. And the strategy of getting the American
people in a debate about
something they don't care about is doomed to fail anyway.
Time out: Since Dickinson brings it up, let's
pause for a moment to remember who those corporations and nonprofits
are (other than BP) that stand in favor of higher taxes
and energy costs for their American customers:
AES
Alcoa
Alstom
Boston Scientific Corporation
Chrysler
The Dow Chemical Company
Duke Energy
DuPont
Environmental Defense Fund
Exelon Corporation
Ford Motor Company
General Electric
General Motors Corporation
Honeywell
Johnson & Johnson
Natural Resources Defense Council
NextEra Energy
NRG Energy
PepsiCo
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
PG&E Corporation
PNM Resources
Rio Tinto
Shell
Siemens Corporation
The Nature Conservancy
Weyerhaeuser
World Resources Institute
So it is no surprise that, as Dickinson writes:
In private, big energy firms were offered sweetheart deals to
acquiesce to the climate bill, including expanded offshore
drilling for oil giants like BP and taxpayer subsidies for coal
and nuclear interests that outstripped those for clean energy.
"Kerry-Lieberman read like an industry wish list," says a top
Senate environmental staffer. "The bill invests heavily in coal
and nuclear, but doesn't do a heck of a lot for efficiency and
renewables."
And then Dickinson blames the President:
On June 15th, the president – a communicator whom even top
Republican operatives rank above Reagan – sat at his desk to
deliver his first address to the nation from the Oval Office.
It was a terrible, teachable moment, one in which he could have
connected the dots between the oil spewing into the Gulf and
the planet-killing CO2 we spew every day into the atmosphere.
But Obama never even mentioned the words "carbon" or
"emissions" or "greenhouse" – not even the word "pollution."
The president's sole mention of "climate" came in a glancing
description of the "comprehensive energy and climate bill" that
the House passed. In a moment that cried out for
direction-setting from the nation's chief executive, Obama
brought no concrete ideas to the table. Restating the need to
break our addiction to fossil fuels, he stared at the camera
and confessed that "we don't yet know precisely how we're going
to get there." He didn't challenge Americans to examine their
own energy habits.
Obviously Dickinson forgot that Obama
laughed with the rest of Congress and the nation during his
State of the Union speech when he talked about the "overwhelming
scientific consensus on climate change:"
In other Rolling Stone news, the latest album from Tom
Petty and the Heartbreakers is
"dynamite!"
