[MCN] US climate politics: The Democrats

[Lance Olsen]

VOX Nov 18, 2017, 9:30am EST

The once and future Democratic consensus on climate change

We have already seen what shape compromise will take.

David Roberts <https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts> 

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/18/16669094/democratic-consensus-on-climate-change <https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/18/16669094/democratic-consensus-on-climate-change>
Excerpts

Some day — perhaps even some day soon <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/is-that-a-democratic-tsunami-taking-shape-for-2018.html> — Democrats will regain some power in the US federal government. What would that mean for climate change policy?

Over at The Atlantic, Rob Meyer tries to answer that question with an insightful piece <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/there-is-no-democratic-plan-to-fight-climate-change/543981/> examining the state of play on climate change politics in the Democratic Party. It is, to make a long story short, a mess. The fragile consensus that once existed among Democrats, embodied in the Waxman-Markey climate bill <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Clean_Energy_and_Security_Act> that passed the House in 2009, fragmented when that bill died an ignominious death in the Senate the following year.

And Humpty Dumpty hasn’t been put back together again.

Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are holding down the progressive end of things, with bills that would end fossil fuel leasing on federal land <https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/750/cosponsors> and target 100 percent renewable electricity by 2050 <https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/987>. In the House, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has proposed the even more ambitious OFF Act, which would target 100 clean energy by 2035 <https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-tulsi-gabbard-leads-act-end-america-s-reliance-fossil-fuels-and-transition-0>.

But the party hasn’t really rallied around any of those bills. Instead, various segments of the left are off doing their own thing: there are activists fighting pipelines, others fighting power plants, and others pushing divestment; there are federal bureaucrats working with the tools in the Clean Air Act; there are wonks fantasizing about a carbon tax; and there are Congressional Democrats, doing basically nothing except condemning Trump.

As Meyer notes, on health care Dems have “Medicare for All.” On immigration, they have the DREAM Act. On LGBT rights, the Equality Act. What’s the slogan, the big bill, the central theme, on climate change? No one knows.

Any federal approach to climate change, to be politically and substantively effective, is going to be shaped by the following four imperatives:

It’s got to put a price on carbon.
It’s got to make regulatory changes that encourage a transition to clean energy.
It’s got to invest a lot of money: in clean energy research, development, and deployment, in infrastructure, in transition assistance, and more.
Within the framework of 1-3, it’s got to garner support from lots of diverse constituencies with contradictory demands, few of whom rank climate change high on their list of priorities.
That’s an extremely tight needle to thread. Waxman-Markey threaded it about as well as was possible in 2009. Insofar as it’s ever threadable again, the instrument will probably look like an updated version of Waxman-Markey (though of course its backers will be insane to ever acknowledge that fact).

To understand why this highly unpopular argument is correct, it’s important to first understand exactly what Waxman-Markey was.

Read it all here:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/18/16669094/democratic-consensus-on-climate-change <https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/11/18/16669094/democratic-consensus-on-climate-change>

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"For decades, we called it ‘global warming,’ an innocuous-sounding phrase invoking a gentle increase in worldwide temperatures, like turning up the thermostat in a house.”

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/content/from-sea-to-rising-sea-climate-change-in-america

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