The Brownstein diagnosis

What went wrong on Lieberman-Warner?

Posted by David Roberts at 10:55 AM on 16 Jun 2008

Read more about: politics | climate | legislation | greenhouse-gas emissions | energy

Ron Brownstein -- for my money the best political reporter out there -- examines the implosion of the Lieberman-Warner bill in National Journal.

Here's his three-paragraph summary of what went wrong:

The bill would have established enough boards and regulations that the chamber [of commerce] was able to distribute a devastating chart, modeled on those used against Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan in 1993, that portrayed the proposal as an impossibly tangled hedge of new bureaucracies. The next version will "have to be simpler," says Eileen Claussen, president of the nonpartisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The bill also provoked unexpectedly stiff opposition on a related front. Under the measure, Washington would distribute about half the credits to emit greenhouse gases for free and would auction the rest--yielding an estimated $3.4 trillion in federal revenue over the next 40 years. Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee derided that money as a "slush fund" that would enable massive spending on causes far beyond clean-energy research. That complaint was somewhat overstated: The legislation would have allocated half of the expected revenue to tax cuts and deficit reduction. But, aiming to buy support, Boxer's final version did shower billions onto programs from wildlife adaptation to worker training. To pass, the reworked bill will need to focus more tightly on subsidizing new technology and providing tax cuts to moderate-income taxpayers to offset the higher energy costs it will trigger.

That raises the final problem. Amid soaring oil prices, proponents faltered before critics' charges that the measure would inflate energy bills. In fact, the best estimate is that the legislation would increase gasoline prices only about 2.5 cents per gallon per year. And although it would more noticeably increase the cost for electricity generated from fossil fuels, that's necessary to make clean alternatives more competitive -- as the International Energy Agency underscored in a farsighted report released on June 6. The agency found that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to a safe level might require $45 trillion in additional energy investment worldwide through 2050 but eventual fuel savings could recover most of that cost.

So, the bill was too complicated and threw around too much pork, and the Dems pushing it had too weak a response to the attack on costs.

Sounds about right to me.

For story: The Brownstein diagnosis
7 Comments | Post a Comment

and if the republicans cared

about stopping warming, any of this would have mattered, why. in terms of winning votes.

are we seeking to present a bill in congress that makes it impossible for republicans to present an argument that doesn't embarrass themselves?

or are we trying to curb warming.

i'm all for getting pollution-based representatives out of office. i think putting this bill forward drew a line between arsonist dinotrolls and forward-thinking "moderates." republicans reacted to a carefully-negotiated bipartisan bill on the issue of our times like it was poison, in a presidential election year.

now they and their shock troops have to go around the country dissociating every weird weather event from their own candidacy. then they have to say why the oil companies deserve public subsidy and deference. then they have to explain why they oppose wind energy development, quickly becoming the great green hope of the heartland. then they have to defend a war for oil.

i don't want to say they're toast but i also think to look at B-L-W through the lens of republican critiques is dumb. they made their bed and deserve to be beaten to political death with it.

expert critiques are worthy.

by hapa at 11:54 AM on 16 Jun 2008

Hapa

It may be bipartisan. The cynic in me rather doubts that the Dems had an incentive to build a pass-able bill that Bush could sign to establish his environmental legacy on the way out the door. I'm not saying I have any evidence here - but for the fact that all the rumblings I heard before the L-W debate started was that given election-year politics, no one on either side of the aisle was betting that this would ever get to a vote. That's not to say that the Rs are of purest motivation of course - only that there was a strong D motivation as well to make sure that the decision point on a carbon bill wasn't until 2009.

by Sean Casten at 12:11 PM on 16 Jun 2008

one other reason: very little grassroots support

One other reason Lieberman-Warner failed is that there was very little grassroots support for it. Because the bill was so watered down, most grassroots activists in the environmental community (people who could potentially turn up the heat on members of Congress) sat this one out. Next time, we might do better with a bill that gets the base excited to work for it.

by dal27 at 12:25 PM on 16 Jun 2008

sean

i hear you. i just think the difference of opinion (and "fact") is so great that "passable," in the minds of the rearguard of the republican revolution, would have been something like this:

we are in favor of companies fitting conservation and source-replacement into their busy schedules.

that's their favored plan.

by hapa at 12:31 PM on 16 Jun 2008

Cap-and-trade like Byzantine health-care system

"Impossibly tangled" nails it! Lieberman-Warner was like the convoluted health-care system that we're stuck in. Everyone in the system gets a cut but it doesn't work very well for users.

Carbon traders, like the insurance companies, would skim money out of everyone's pockets without reducing global warming.

Clauseen is right-- SIMPLIFY! But not just a little bit. Go for a revenue-neutral carbon tax with dividend. No pork, no games, no price spikes, no free permits.

See www.carbontax.org for more information and news about revenue-neutral carbon taxes. British Columbia is doing it. We can, too!

by F James Handley at 5:13 PM on 16 Jun 2008

Cap and Trade Catch 22

Unfortunately, making the bill simpler and giving out less pork is easier said than done. Or I should say, it contributes to passing the bill among some, but also raises significant opposition. Let's not forget that that "transition assistance" only got in there in the first place to try and soften what otherwise was feared as 100% bill-killing opposition by some powerful interests. None of the bill's supporters actually wanted it. I talked to a few staffers working on it and that was made really clear. There is a bit of damned if you do and damned if you don't on the chances of helping passage by doling out allowances for votes.

Also, we really should put this "the best estimate is that the legislation would increase gasoline prices only about 2.5 cents per gallon per year" thing to bed. That "best estimate" is the EIA's CORE modeling case, which has many entirely untenable assumptions. Just to give a couple: World Oil Price steadily declines to $65 a barrel by 2030 (2006 dollars) - the 25 cent increase was based on a %, so if you don't expect oil to be $65 a barrel than you can't read that model (and %) as projecting only a 25 cent nominal increase.

Second, the % is almost certainly underestimated, for, among other reasons, that modeling case projecting 240GW of new nuclear capacity being built in 10 YEARS, from 2020 to 2030. If you're thinking 'but electricity doesn't run cars (for the most part yet),' its actually not relevant here. Because the price increase in gas will be a function of the permit price, and the permit price will be a direct function of the cost of overhauling the electricity sector, which all models predict will contain the vast majority of emissions reductions. And obviously the cost of overhauling the electricity sector will be higher than the EIA CORE case models if you doubt that 240 nuc plants will be built at $2.5billion and 4 years each in 10 years, which is what that model counts on.

The Republicans threw around some really phony numbers, but the Dems (and many greens, including plenty on grist) stoop to their level when we rely on ridiculously unrealistic numbers like these as well. I'm not trying to moralize here, I think politically its a better bet if we're more upfront about this. It really pained me to hear Inhofe counter B-L-W supporters during Senate debate that the 2 cent a year gas increase projection relied on over 200 new nukes, knowing that he actually had the high ground in that exchange. We have more credibility to make the argument that theres enough money in the program to offset these rising costs, as long as we don't trash that credibility by pretending the rising costs won't exist in the first place.

by Max8806 at 5:44 PM on 16 Jun 2008

Rising Costs

I'll take Max's advice one step further: we should be telling people that higher costs are what's needed in order to save the Earth. People need to be told the truth and made accountable for their actions, not treated like spoiled children who demand low prices for things they shouldn't have to begin with, like oil. If people were willing to sacrifice during WWII to stop the Nazis, they'd almost certainly be willing to do the same to save our planet. The problem is, the corrupt lackey politicians of both major parties have been pandering for so long that people are now used to being pandered to, so the truth will come as somewhat of a shock. The sooner the truth begins to be told, the better.

by Wolverine at 1:24 PM on 17 Jun 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

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