The Once and Future Climate Bill

During this  intense campaign season, lots of pressing issues demand our attention, including the war in Iraq and the receding economy. Yet after a summer of soaring gas prices and cancelled travel plans, American voters are rating energy the number one issue in the 2008 elections.

The White House and too many in Congress have failed to address voters' concerns: they keep offering the same dirty -- fuel policies-more drill and burn -- that got us into this mess. But some leaders are beginning to realize that tackling the energy crisis will require something bolder, something visionary. They see a path that will not only address high energy prices and create jobs but also combat global warming by fundamentally ending U.S. dependence on dangerous fossil fuels.

For the past year, NRDC has kept the pressure on our national leaders to embrace this path. We hold accountable members of Congress who insist on keeping America hooked on polluting, high-cost fuels, and we offer support for those working toward clean energy solutions. We believe that within a year, we can achieve our goal of passing legislation to create a more sustainable energy future that deals head-on with the climate crisis. Why am I so sure? Because we helped advance global warming legislation farther this year than anyone thought possible.

Some advocates believed that it was premature to bring a global warming bill to a vote -- that this Congress wouldn't pass it or that this president would veto it. But at NRDC, we knew that the best way to get our representatives' attention was to have a piece of viable legislation they could sink their teeth into. That's why we decided to support what eventually became the Climate Security Act.

We wanted the policy debate to start with rigorous goals. In November 2006, NRDC Climate Center staff members Dan Lashof, David Doniger, and Antonia Herzog published an article in Science arguing that the way to make deep reductions in global warming pollution was to take the long view: 80 percent reductions by 2050. At the time no legislators were looking beyond 2020. But NRDC's experts are widely recognized as leading thinkers on this issue, so the policies we outlined for achieving this goal attracted attention. We shared our vision with our partners in the environmental community and took the article to Capitol Hill, where many of its ideas helped guide the discussion of global-warming legislation. 

Our next step was to work with our colleagues at partner groups to establish global warming as the top legislative priority of the environmental community for 2008. We created a unified front. This was the first time we all told the same story: stop global warming.

Last fall, senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and JohnWarner of Virginia responded to our urgings by drafting the Climate Security Act. We spent the fall working successfully to strengthen the bill, and during the spring we built broad support for it. Finally, in the first week of June, the bill came to the Senate floor for a vote. This in itself was groundbreaking -- the first time that climate legislation was the business of the Senate for an entire week. The only previous efforts to address global warming were merely amendments offered to a larger energy bill, so they garnered limited attention.

This time around we had every reason to expect meaningful deliberations. Quickly, though, the discussion was derailed by a handful of senators who opposed the bill. The most audacious attempt to stonewall and hijack the debate came on Wednesday, June 4, when Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky demanded that all 492 pages of the bill be read aloud; such a request had not been made in the Senate in more than a decade. Reading the bill swallowed up an entire day -- time that could have been spent debating the substance of the bill.

Many senators, most notably Barbara Boxer of California, tried to steer the debate back to global warming. As chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Boxer was instrumental in bringing the bill to the floor and crafting its final language. She and I spoke several times a day, but ultimately her and other Senate leaders' attempts to focus on policy were thwarted by politics. On Friday morning, 54 senators were in favor of ending the delaying tactics, but this number was shy of the 60 votes needed, and the bill died.

Change in Washington demands nothing if not perseverance: it took 10 years to pass legislation addressing acid rain and 11 years to pass last year's increase in fuel-efficiency standards. A bill to successfully tackle global warming will be the most complex piece of environmental legislation ever written in the United States. It won't have an impact on just one industry (say, cars or coal) or one sector (energy or manufacturing). It affects them all.

NRDC's ultimate goal is to curb global warming through the unfettered development of clean energy technologies and strategies. We will work endlessly to craft a bill and garner support for effective legislation that promises to achieve that goal. As noted by Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a key swing vote, this summer's Climate Security Act was "the dress rehearsal" for what will likely be the final vote next year. Meanwhile, the bill forced senators to identify where they stand on climate legislation. Now, finally, we can honestly say that a majority of the Senate is engaged in a serious discussion about how to deal with global warming.

Across the country, people are concerned about soaring energy prices and sinking economic indicators. The global warming legislation we envision addresses both: it ends our addiction to dirty, expensive fuels and creates long-lasting jobs in clean technologies here at home.

But if we don't get the ball rolling now with global warming legislation and smart energy policies, our planet -- and our economy -- will suffer gravely. So we have to keep the pressure on our leaders. NRDC will continue its efforts to hold Congress to task, and I urge you to do the same. Tell your representatives and the presidential candidates to set America on a more sustainable energy path. The time for bold measures is now. 

Frances Beinecke
President