Tom Friedman has a new column, “Tea Party With a Difference.” He refers to my “insightful new book” Straight Up. If you want to buy that book, which has been called the “premiere book on climate change,” click here.
If you want to know more about me or this website, start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.” You can get daily email updates on climate science, solutions, and politics by clicking here. The Climate Progress post he quotes from is “Straight Up: What to look for in the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.”
Friedman proposes a Green Tea Party of the “radical center” to supersede the current fringe Tea Party that is lurching to the “hard libertarian right”:
Indeed, the Green Tea Party could say, “We’ve got our own health care plan — a plan to make America healthy by simultaneously promoting energy security, deficit security and environmental security.”
“Think about it,” said Carl Pope, the chairman of the Sierra Club. “Green tea is full of antioxidants,” which some believe help reduce cancer and heart disease. “It’s really good for your health.” And a Green Tea Party, he added, could be good for the country’s health “by harnessing all of its energy and unconventional politics” to end our addiction to oil.
Yes, I know, dream on. The Tea Party is heading to the hard libertarian right and would never support an energy bill that puts a fee on carbon.
So if there is going to be a Green Tea Party, it will have to emerge from a different place — the radical center, a center committed to a radical departure from business as usual. Acting on that impulse, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman are expected to unveil a bipartisan climate/energy/jobs bill on Monday that deserves an energetic centrist Green Tea Party to support it.
This bill is far from perfect. It is a shame the fossil fuel industries still have such a stranglehold on Congress. But it’s the best we’re going to get, and we have got to get started. But without a centrist Green Tea Party Movement — one that brings the same passion to cutting emissions that the Tea Party brings to cutting deficits — even this effort will never pass.
I think that we won’t get serious climate and clean energy jobs legislation until we have a movement of single-issue voters on the issue with the intensity of the current Tea Partoers, but much larger than that tiny, overhyped group. [For more on that hype, the Politico had a must-read piece Thursday, “The tea party’s exaggerated importance.”]
And yes, breaking news creates a real possibility that the bill won’t be introduced Monday, at least not with Graham.
Friedman quotes me on the bill’s virtues, such as they are:
This bill introduces a carbon price and other means to control the CO2 emissions of various sectors of the economy, without an economywide cap-and-trade system. The bill’s goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. But to garner broad support, it will also expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power and offer tax breaks to manufacturers who make their facilities more energy efficient and create green jobs.
“No bill that could pass Congress right now or in the immediate future would be sufficient to produce enough clean power to mitigate climate change at the rate we need,” remarked the physicist Joe Romm, who writes the blog climateprogress.org and is author of an insightful new book on this subject, Straight Up. “We simply aren’t sufficiently desperate to do what is needed, which is nonstop deployment of a staggering amount of low-carbon energy, including energy efficiency, for the rest of the century.”
The reason a Green Tea Party should coalesce to support this bill, argued Romm, is because it will set a price on carbon pollution and help foster commercialization of clean technologies — like hybrids, batteries and solar — at sufficient scale to enable the U.S. to rapidly ramp up when the seriousness of climate change becomes inescapably obvious to all.
In short, the bill is a step in the right direction toward reducing greenhouse gases and expanding our base of clean power technologies so we can compete with China in this newest global industry. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t beanbag. And if we don’t start now, every solar panel, electric car and wind turbine we’ll have to buy when climate change really hits will come with instructions in Chinese. Go Green Tea Party.
You can’t win if you don’t play (see “The only way to win the clean energy race is to pass the clean energy bill“)
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