Change of Climate

By ERIC POOLEY

You can tell when the politicians are getting serious about an issue: they stop taking cheap shots at one another and suddenly become pragmatic. Amazingly, that's happening right now on global warming. Just as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of "abrupt and irreversible" damage if we don't take immediate action, a serious piece of climate legislation is beginning to pick up speed in the U.S. Senate.

America's Climate Security Act, a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner, would create a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 65% below 1990 levels by 2050. It has made it out of subcommittee and has a good chance of reaching the Senate floor. Its strength can be measured by what the candidates are saying about it--and by what they're not saying.

At an environmental forum held Nov. 17 in Los Angeles, many of the green activists in the audience expected John Edwards to come out gunning for Hillary Clinton. All he had to do was challenge her to join him in opposing Lieberman-Warner because it would give away billions to heavily polluting industries. Edwards had denounced the bill as a "corporate windfall," but Clinton--who serves on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee and will soon have to vote on it--hadn't taken a position. The day before, Friends of the Earth Action, which has endorsed Edwards, started running a radio ad in Iowa praising Edwards for his "courageous stand against the bill" and urging voters to "call Senator Clinton and tell her we've had enough of corporate polluters and billion-dollar giveaways. Tell her it's time to fix or ditch Lieberman-Warner."

In short, Edwards had Clinton all teed up. She can't fudge her way out of this one, he could say. If she votes for the bill in its current form, you will know the lobbyists own her. And since her vote is crucial to getting the bill out of committee, his attack could have made it less likely that Congress would act on climate change this year.

But Edwards decided not to take that swing. He didn't attack Clinton or the bill. Why not? Because the politics of climate change are moving so fast and in such a pragmatic direction that he didn't want to get caught out. His campaign had been hearing from key environmental groups, says an Edwards adviser, "and the consensus was that they don't want to trash this bill. They want to strengthen it, not kill it."

So give Edwards credit for holding fire, and feel the hot, dry winds blowing on this issue. They got Virginia Republican Warner's attention when business leaders like GE CEO Jeff Immelt came out in favor of mandatory caps on carbon emissions, a move that also blew down the straw house of the deny-and-delay crowd. The legislation that Warner has written with Lieberman, an Independent, combines elements of earlier, stillborn bills, and it won crucial backing from California Senator Barbara Boxer, Democratic chairwoman of the Environment Committee. "This is an election issue," she says. "Voters need to know which Senators believe global warming is real and which don't."

The cap-and-trade system envisioned by Lieberman-Warner, in which government sets emissions limits and auctions or gives away pollution allowances that can then be bought and sold, would raise billions for energy investment by imposing billions in new costs on polluters. Who pays, how much is paid and who gets to spend those billions will be one of the great political battles of this generation. Naturally, some business interests want to delay the day of reckoning, and they're making common cause with some green groups that don't think it's possible to get a strong enough bill through this Congress. Those groups would rather wait until 2009, when, they hope, there will be a Democrat in the White House and larger Democratic majorities in Congress.

There are two problems with this strategy. First, the election may not go the Democrats' way. If they grab defeat from the jaws of victory, Republicans could lose the incentive to cut a climate deal. Second, fixing the climate is like saving for retirement--the longer we wait, the harder it gets. That's not to say Lieberman-Warner is perfect. Its emissions targets should be tougher, and it gives away too many pollution allowances for free. But let's dream for a moment. If it manages to pass both houses of Congress (a mighty big if), the bill would land with a thud on George W. Bush's desk shortly before the 2008 election. Bush has always said he would veto any bill with mandatory carbon caps. But he recently sent a back-channel signal to Congress that he might be willing to deal. Now that would be some abrupt and irreversible climate change.

Editor at large Pooley is writing a book about the politics of climate change