What happened to climate legislation?
After reading Ryan Lizza's beautiful piece in the New Yorker, I got angry.
It's a feat of excellent insider reporting, detailing the climate bill's slow and grim demise amongst a group of self-serving politicians, particulary John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham who sponsored the legislation. If anything good can be taken away from the article: This is a great lesson in what not do for the next go-around. You are exposed to the dysfunction of the senate in terms of structure and personnel. You see how incompetence and poor coordination by Democratic leaders sank the bill. You learn there is no sewer John McCain won't crawl through. When he bailed on climate change to appeal to more conservative voters because he faced a serious candidate, Graham took his place. The media followed appropriately:
For years, Graham had lived in McCain's shadow. But, as the rebellious politics of 2010 transformed McCain into a harsh partisan, Graham adopted McCain's old identity as the Senate's happy moderate. To Graham's delight, on December 23rd Time posted an online article headlined "LINDSEY GRAHAM: NEW GOP MAVERICK IN THE SENATE." The photograph showed Graham standing at a lectern with Lieberman and Kerry.
Angry at being out-mavericked, McCain screams at Graham and it gets worse when a story is leaked that the bill contains language about a gas tax. So Graham bails too. However, no party or clique walks away unscathed. While the senators worked on this bill, Obama announced on March 31st that large portions of U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico we're open for drilling. Two days later, he said, “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.” From the outside, it looked as if the Obama Administration were coordinating closely with Democrats in the Senate. Republicans and the oil industry wanted more domestic drilling, and Obama had just given it to them. He seemed to be delivering on the grand bargain that his aides had talked about at the start of the Administration.
And by "grand bargain," it was the White House promise oil drilling in exchange for a cap on carbon. It backfired. After the oil spill, it seemed to many environmentalists climate legislation would be reborn. Wrong. Lizza put it best: "Kerry and Lieberman were left sponsoring a bill with a sweeping expansion of offshore drilling at a moment when the newspapers were filled with photographs of birds soaking in oil. Even worse, the lone Republican, who had written the oil-drilling section to appeal to his Republican colleagues, was gone."
But after the jump is my favorite episode, with Kerry and T. Boone Pickens.
Three weeks later, Kerry and some aides were in his office discussing the progress of their bill. Someone mentioned T. Boone Pickens, the author of the so-called Pickens Plan, an energy-independence proposal centered on enormous government subsidies for natural gas, which is abundant, cleaner-burning than other fossil fuels, and sold by a Pickens-controlled corporation at some two hundred natural-gas fuelling stations across North America. Back in 2004, Pickens had helped to fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that ran a sleazy—and inaccurate—ad campaign proclaiming, among other things, that Kerry had lied about the circumstances that led to his Bronze Star and Purple Hearts.
Kerry had an inspiration. “I’m going to call T. Boone,” he said. Frangione was surprised. “You really want to call that guy?” she asked. Kerry told an aide to get Pickens on the phone. Minutes later, Kerry was inviting Pickens to Washington to talk. Rosengarten, who watched Kerry make the call, thought it was “a show of extraordinary leadership.” The following week, Pickens and Kerry sat in two upholstered chairs in the Senator’s office. Between them loomed a giant model of Kerry’s Vietnam swift boat. Kerry walked Pickens through the components of the bill that he and his colleagues were writing, but Pickens seemed uninterested. He had just one request: include in the climate legislation parts of a bill that Pickens had written, called the Natural Gas Act, a series of tax incentives to encourage the use of natural-gas vehicles and the installation of natural-gas fuelling stations. In exchange, Pickens would publicly endorse the bill. At the end of the meeting, the Senator shook hands with the man who had probably cost him the Presidency. Afterward, staffers in one of the K.G.L. offices started telling a joke: “What do you call a climate bill that gives Pickens everything he ever dreamed of?” “A Boonedoggle!”
