Waxman Markey Confuses Political Camps

May 22nd, 2009

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

With the Waxman Markey Bill passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee thanks to the tireless and strong leadership of its Chairman, Henry Waxman (D-CA), there will now be some time for reflection on what happens next. The simple answer is “no one knows.”

The bill could be referred to other committees for mark-up — following the same process that we observed this week in Energy and Commerce. The House Agriculture Committee has expressed an interest in having jurisdiction over the bill. If so, then the bill will certainly be watered down further to placate agricultural interests. We saw a bit of this late in the debate over Waxman Markey when an amendment was offered to “grandfather” offsets for actions taken by farmers more than a decade before W-M is intended to go into effect, i.e., for emissions already reduced, as if that makes any sense. Even if the jurisdictional issues are resolved without a further referral, these concerns will necessarily be addressed if and when the bill comes to the floor. When (and if) the bill eventually comes to the full House it will face a range of concerns, almost all of which will lead to a further weakening of the bill and concessions to various interests who want a piece of the pie. An after this long process, whatever results, if approved by the House, is probably DOA anyway as the bill faces long odds in the Senate. There are a lot of wild cards in the mix not raised here as well.

Far more certain has been the reaction of advocates for action on climate change who have displayed a very wide range of responses to Waxman Markey.

For instance, Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, champions W-M as the only possible vehicle for reducing US emssions, and rejoices at the bill’s progress thus far:

Many people have asked me how I can reconcile my climate science realism, which demands far stronger action than the Waxman-Markey bill requires, and my climate politics realism, which has led me to strongly advocate passage of this flawed bill.

The short answer is that Waxman-Markey is the only game in town. If it fails, I see no chance whatsoever of stabilizing anywhere near 350 to 450 ppm since serious U.S. action would certainly be off the table for years, the effort to jumpstart the clean energy economy in this country would stall, the international negotiating process would fall apart, and any chance of a deal with China would be dead.

At the other end of the spectrum Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeake Climate Action network (pictured in photo below at the protest, far right) was arrested yesterday along with 14 colleagues for blocking the office of Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA), a Democrat who supported W-M and help craft an important compromise (supported by Waxman and Markey) that got the bill out of committee.

For his part Congressman Boucher wants to see the current energy mix sustained for at least the next 10 years, relying on the offset provisions in W-M to allow business as usual to continue, as he relates early in the following clip:

Allowing business as usual for the next 10 years has proved too tough to swallow for some. For instance, a CCAN member relates details of a meeting with another member of the Energy and Commerce Committee he arranged via a hunger strike and office sit in:

I went to [Congressman] Mike Doyle’s (D-PA) office at 2 pm yesterday and told Pat Cavanaugh, his energy staff person, that I was a long-time climate activist on the 18th day of a hunger strike (www.fastingforourfuture.org) for strong climate legislation and that I wasn’t leaving until I met with Doyle. . .

But as I sat in Doyle’s office, no one with me, none of the press people who I called showing up to find out what was happening, thinking about what was going to happen at 6 pm, wondering if I had been too impulsive, wondering what would happen if I was arrested–because I was very clear that it was either talk with Doyle or that–wondering, wondering. . . after two hours of sitting, into the office comes Mike Doyle.

I’d never met the guy, so at first I didn’t know it had happened when he arrived. But when he sat down across from me and said something like, “I’m Mike Doyle, what’s up,” I knew it was game time. And for the next half hour I had the most intense, in-your-face, no-holds-barred discussion with an elected official I have ever had.

Doyle’s no dummy, and I have to acknowledge that he’s a strong debater. I didn’t get him to change his mind about the efforts that he and Rick Boucher have been leading to weaken the “discussion draft” of climate legislation Henry Waxman introduced on March 31st. The way Doyle described it, he was doing the bidding of Waxman, carrying water for him by going to the blue dog Democrats to find out what was necessary in order to get a bill out of committee. He also said his main thing was the 15% free emissions permits for steel, cement, aluminum and other energy-intensive industries during a 10-15 year transition period. But when I asked him why he was then supporting the idea that 40% of the permits would be given free to coal companies/utilities (local distribution companies), the best answer he could give was something like this, a very revealing answer:

“If you return money directly to the American people for them to use to pay for higher energy costs in the transition period, they’ll spend it on things like flat screen TV’s. By giving free emissions permits to utilities they can then pass on the savings directly to consumers.”

With the environmental community split, the Republicans must be enjoying a good bit of satisfaction, despite the movement of the W-M bill out of committee. Going forward, the bill will require ever more compromises, and it is hard to see these actions winning more supporters to the bill from the environmental community.

Waxman Markey may well have taken its first steps toward a protracted death spiral, taking with it any semblance of consensus and coordination of the environmental community about what to do on climate change.

7 Responses to “Waxman Markey Confuses Political Camps”

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  1. stan Says:

    Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that even Waxman doesn’t know what’s in his bill. http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/05/waxman_admits_he_doesnt_know_w.asp

    These buffoons are the same idiots who voted to give $900 million to terrorists to “stimulate” our economy. And it was so important to do so (along with several trillions more in spending) that there was no time to read the bill or even discuss it before voting. So that it could sit on the President’s desk for days until he returned from vacation.

    Any intelligent thought coming from these clowns is nothing more than a fortuitous coincidence.

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  3. kkloor Says:

    Roger,

    Is all that’s left to do is watch the spectacle of the WM climate train wend its way through a torturous course? There’s an excellent commentary on the bill by Steven Pearlstein ( a business journalist) in today’s WaPo, which I write about here: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2009/05/22/climate-train-departs-for-unknown-destination/

    Pearlstein suggests it’s not too late to start over. But I wonder: is that even possible now that the train has left the station?

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  5. jae Says:

    Maybe Washington is not as “protected” from the real world as I thought! What a chirade!

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  7. jae Says:

    Oops. that’s charade. It is actually fun to watch.

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  9. Maurice Garoutte Says:

    If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then the W/M tax bill is a vampire camel designed by competing green lobbyists. The bill is pretty ugly and useless now but our congress critters can slap on some lipstick and trim it down so that only the head of the camel gets in the tent. There have been so many millions of dollars pumped into so many campaigns that the bill will be very hard to kill.

    Sunlight is the only way to finally kill the beast. If the opponents can just slow the process down the public has a chance to see the results of the bill clearly.

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  11. DavidE Says:

    Someone was saying that there may be about 7 or 8 climate change deniers in Congress. Looking at the bill, I think its closer to 400 climate change deniers with 7 or 8 outspoken about it and the remaining 390 or so in the closet.

    Look, if someone seriously thinks that climate change is going to destroy the planet, then they should take drastic action. I think the entire purpose of this bill is just Economic. Its an excuse to:

    (1) Raise taxes;
    (2) Make businesses and industries subject to the whims of Congress (great for filling campaign coffers);

    (3) Be able to provide big handouts in the form of allowances to constitutents;
    (4) Be able to put up trade barriers in the form of taxes in lieu of the U.S. carbon taxes;
    (5) Reward the same idiot brokers who got us into the financial crisis by allowing them to trade carbon allowancess;
    and
    (6) An excuse to provide massive foreign aid that President Obama wanted.

    The legislation will probably increase emissions because the money that the U.S. sends to other countries will probably fund coal plants and oil purchases that those countries couldn’t have afforded.

    Look, if they did something like Gov. Huntsman did in Utah and provide big incentives for a switch to natural gas, that would accomplish more than this cap and trade idiocy. And that would be relatively simple.

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  13. Jon Frum Says:

    “I went into the Congressman’s office, and told them I’d hold my breath until he spoke to me.”

    The vanity is stunning. Twenty years from now, books will be written about these times, and people will shake their heads. I’m thinking of titles like, maybe, “The Madness of Crowds.”