by Brad Johnson
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.
Senators drafting comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation are negotiating with polluters, and talking about combining a cap on carbon with public incentives for nuclear plants, “clean coal,” and offshore drilling.
Should supporters of strong, progressive action to solve the climate
crisis give up on Congress and work within the existing legal framework
of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and other environmental
legislation?
We would then rely entirely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s
existing authority to set rules for greenhouse gas pollution. However,
the EPA is subject to the same outside political pressures as lawmakers, who control the EPA’s purse-strings. Single members of
Congress or single committee chairmen can interfere quite effectively
with agency activities if they put their mind to it.
In addition, polluters have all kinds of legal tools they can—and
already are starting to—use to tie up, slow down and otherwise impede
the implementation of EPA rules. Without a Congressional mandate behind
it, the EPA will not have the political power it needs to implement
rules with the kind of strength activists want and the science demands.
The success of EPA rules absent Congressional action would depend on
the politics of whatever administration is in power.
By abandoning legislative reform, climate advocates could instead spend their resources on litigating against sources of global warming pollution.
But it also takes a lot of money and time to litigate against a coal
plant, and even more to win at it. Even if we could knock out all the
new coal plants through litigation, that isn’t going to be a workable
strategy for dealing with the ones that are already chugging away, not
to mention the refineries, chemical plants, and the rest of the
industrial sector, or the transportation sector.
If climate legislation reaches President Obama’s desk with a robust
framework, and gets core elements in place, we will come back to it and
keep making it better over time. We couldn’t get Congress to get the
Clean Air Act right the first time. So the original 1967 law was
amended—in 1970, then again in 1977, then again in 1990. This is why
strong—and rapid—scientific review provisions are an important
element.
It is a travesty that political reality makes it is incredibly
difficult to get even a watered-down climate bill even into the
ballpark of passage. To change that situation, we need to mobilize grassroots activism to change the political calculus for key states like Arkansas, Missouri, the Dakotas, Indiana, West Virginia, and so on.
At the same time, the federal legislative push shouldn’t be the
basket where all the eggs are placed either; policymaking at the local, state, and regional levels have always led the federal level, and the traditional Clean Air Act
framework is well-designed and understood. New climate legislation
should integrate with existing policy through amendment, not blanket
preemption.
Anyone who wants to see a stronger bill can help make it happen by putting meaningful pressure on the senators who are sitting on the fence or near it to support strong climate legislation, and being descriptive in naming what you’d like to see legislation do.
That’s the only way to reduce the number of unappetizing deals that
are going to get made. Telling people that the vehicle that’s moving
right now is hopeless and worthless makes the sponsors’ jobs that much harder—which means they’ll just cut more deals in order to get the bill done.
What’s critical for activists—including professional environmentalists—to remember is that the goal of climate activism isn’t comprehensive climate legislation, or strong
EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Our shared, common goal is a
green economy that rewards work, not pollution, and saves the natural
gifts of the world without which we all perish.
Related Links:
Lindsey ‘Green Economy’ Graham bashes the Clean Air Act
Reminder: the U.S. already has cap-and-trade—in the Northeast
American Enterprise Institute accidentally makes the case for climate legislation