Politics-as-usual while the planet burns: the problem with climate legislation.

• Author: Tokar, Brian
• Position: Less Energy, More Justice - Essay

As of this writing, national legislation aimed to address the global climate crisis is bogged down in the US Senate. While Senator Barbara Boxer of California, the main sponsor along with John Kerry of Massachusetts, is anxious to hold a committee hearing on the bill, Republican Senators are thus far boycotting the entire effort. The Senate Republicans are denouncing the bill for many reasons, from outright denial of human responsibility for climate changes, to their inclination to defend fossil fuel interests, to claims that it's nothing more than another federal tax.

Considerably less reported, though, is the fact that increasing numbers of environmental activists oppose this legislation. A lively debate has ensued among environmentalists over the question: Is this bill better or worse than nothing?

The current Senate bill is a somewhat revised version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES bill, that passed the House of Representatives last summer, under the sponsorship of Rep. Waxman of California and Rep. Markey of Massachusetts. Rep. Waxman called the House passage a "decisive and historic action," and President Obama described the bill as "a bold and necessary step." Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, among the most corporate-friendly of the major environmental groups, called it no less than "the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country."

Environmental Defense, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nature Conservancy, played an important role in the development of the bill. As members of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former big three US automakers, among others, they helped articulate what would become the bill's broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.

While many environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief, and suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. As the bill meandered its way through various House committees, groups like Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action and the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The bill falls far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and seeks to implement decades of emissions cuts through the market-based device known as "cap and trade." It also contains a number of Trojan Horse provisions that it shares with the Senate bill and could ultimately forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress. While low expectations and politics-as-usual continue to impede progress in the US, activists in Europe and throughout the global South are raising far more forward-looking demands.

By the time the House bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. An international consensus is emerging that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 25-40% are needed in the next decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 85-95% required by mid-century. Both bills attempt to shift the terms of the...