For three months, a period of record-high temperatures in Washington, what was now called the Kerry-Lieberman bill was debated and discussed as if it were a viable piece of legislation, but no Republican stepped forward to support it. During one speech in early June, Obama said that he knew “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.” He never found them, and he didn’t appear to be looking very hard.
Kerry and Lieberman abandoned their attempt to cap the emissions of the oil industry and heavy manufacturers and pared the bill back so that it would cover only the utility industry. The E.E.I. wanted even more if utilities were to be the only guinea pigs for cap-and-trade. This time, the electric companies demanded regulatory relief from non-greenhouse-gas emissions, like mercury and other poisons, as well as more free allowances. Kerry refused to discuss those pollutants, but, in what was probably the nadir of the twenty-month effort, he responded, “Well, what if we gave you more time to comply and decreased the rigor of the reduction targets?” The cap was supposed to be sacrosanct, but Kerry had put it on the table. As a participant said afterward, “The poster child of this bill is its seventeen-per-cent-reduction target. It’s the President’s position in Copenhagen. It’s equal to the House bill.” Now Kerry was saying they could go lower.
As hopes for any kind of bill faded, Kerry and Lieberman kept fighting. They met with Olympia Snowe, who, like Tantalus’ fruit tree, always seemed to be almost within their grasp. She had started talking to them about the utility-only bill, and the two senators begged her to allow them to mention her name publicly to reporters. “Can we please just say that you’re willing to have a conversation about options?” Kerry asked. “No, do not say that,” Snowe responded. Still, Kerry could not resist telling reporters that day, “Even this morning, Senator Lieberman and I had a meeting with one Republican who has indicated a willingness to begin working towards something.”
Meanwhile, there was someone who, like Snowe, was in favor of the bill but was not prepared to do more: Barack Obama. After the K.G.L. failure, environmentalists and congressional aides who work on climate change were critical of the White House. Many of them believe that Obama made an epic blunder by not pursuing climate change first when he was sworn into office. The stimulus failed to reduce unemployment to an acceptable level. The health-care law, while significant, only raised the percentage of people with insurance from eighty-five per cent to ninety-five per cent. Meanwhile, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already above the level that scientists say risks causing runaway global warming. According to the argument, Obama was correct when he said during the campaign that placing a price on carbon in order to transform the economy and begin the process of halting climate change was his more pressing priority.
No diagnosis of the failure of Obama to tackle climate change would be complete without taking into account public opinion. In January, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the importance of twenty-one issues. Climate change came in last. After winning the fight over health care, another issue for which polling showed lukewarm support, Obama moved on to the safer issue of financial regulatory reform.
In September, I asked Al Gore why he thought climate legislation had failed. He cited several reasons, including Republican partisanship, which had prevented moderates from becoming part of the coalition in favor of the bill. The Great Recession made the effort even more difficult, he added. “The forces wedded to the old patterns still have enough influence that they were able to use the fear of the economic downturn as a way of slowing the progress toward this big transition that we have to make.”
A third explanation pinpointed how Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman approached the issue. “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level,” Gore said. “And it’s to the point where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman were not alone in their belief that transforming the economy required coöperation, rather than confrontation, with industry. American Presidents who have attempted large-scale economic transformation have always had their efforts tempered—and sometimes neutered—by powerful economic interests. Obama knew that, too, and his Administration had led the effort to find workable compromises in the case of the bank bailouts, health-care legislation, and Wall Street reform. But on climate change Obama grew timid and gave up, leaving the dysfunctional Senate to figure out the issue on its own.
As the Senate debate expired this summer, a longtime environmental lobbyist told me that he believed the “real tragedy” surrounding the issue was that Obama understood it profoundly. “I believe Barack Obama understands that fifty years from now no one’s going to know about health care,” the lobbyist said. “Economic historians will know that we had a recession at this time. Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.” ♦
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