By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Climate legislation is returning to the Senate’s docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.

A long, long time ago…

Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.

Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn’t dead. A new bill is coming—more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.

Third time’s the charm

Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He’s waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who’ve been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don’t seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.

In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.

With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.

Will it work?

Kerry’s expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: “There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details.”

From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress’ Tristan Fowler.

“There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don’t think we’re getting near that territory at the moment,” Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.

Sickly green

Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress’ legislation, consider Johann Hari’s testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.

Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he “imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path—one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.”

Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.

“You can’t stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, ‘Sorry, the swing states don’t want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,’” Hari writes.

The green future

When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries—or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry’s lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)

In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.

“While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top,” Roberts explains.

No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world’s climate.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

 

 

(Crossposted at The Motley Moose)

In a 137-122 secret vote, the Democratic Caucus followedtherecommendation of their steering committee to replace John Dingell with Henry Waxman as chairman of the influential House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Dingell, who represents Michigan's 15th district and is a staunch ally of Detroit's automobile manufacturers as well as sportsmen's groups and pro-gun organizations, held the endorsement of many Blue Dog Democrats to keep the chair.  Waxman, as part of a more progressive wing of the Democratic party long frustrated by environmental obstructionism in both parties, is expected to use the broad jurisdiction of the committee to pursue more aggressive oversight and reform in a variety of areas in a manner more in line with the agenda of President-elect Barack Obama.

Dingell has been either Chairman or Ranking Member of the committee since 1981.  As chairmanships are usually determined by seniority, Waxman's coup over a man who will become the longest serving Representative in the history of the House this February is quite uncommon.

Senior Democrats were stunned by the Waxman victory, which seemingly dealt a blow to the party's long-held principle of seniority. "It's just been buried," Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said of seniority.

Dingell has in the past consistently opposed efforts to tighten environmental controls affecting Detroit, especially fuel economy and emissions standards.  This attitude has earned him the ire of more liberal Democrats including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who, although remaining officially neutral during Waxman's campaign to win the chair, clearly favored her fellow Californian for the post.

He has often clashed publicly with Pelosi, who made an end-run around Dingell last year by creating a temporary committee chaired by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), a close Pelosi ally, to oversee global warming issues.

Despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's public neutrality in the race, Rangel accused her of tacitly supporting Waxman because her closest allies in the House ran his campaign and she did not intervene to stop Waxman, a home-state colleague, from running a campaign that exposed ideological fissures among Democrats.

"I assume that not playing a role is playing a role," Rangel said.

The committee is likely to play a role immediately, helping to negotiate the terms and concessions of the big 3 bailout.  Dingell is married to the executive director for public affairs at General Motors and would have very probably called for a no-strings-attached package, while Waxman is likely to negotiate far tougher terms and hold management accountable for their failures.

Energy and Commerce is extremely influential on matters that affect the US economy, and so will play a more even important role than usual in the 111th Congress.  It's encouraging for it to have a progressive leader who will fully support Obama's legislative goals to enact real change for our country.

There's more...

A Bloomberg piece today has Commerce Committee chairman-to-be Dingell highlighting an ambiguity in the Dem proposals on Medicare reform.

The party's commitment, as stated on page 6 of the long version of New Direction, was stated (in characterstically dismal fashion) thus:

Fix the medicare prescription drug benefit by putting seniors first by negotiating lower drug prices...

The reference in the 100 Hours list is substantially identical.

Now, of course the pledge can't be read literally. Congress (not even a Dem-controlled one) can negotiate Medicare drug prices.

There's more...

There are many ways to neuter people-power, and the reactionary corporate barons are trying them all.  There's the perpetual and dishonest smear campaign against Pelosi, there's the massive expansion of Democratic lobbying shops underway, and I'm sure there will be an attempted Democratic K-Street project of some sort.  But one of the most interesting cries you may start hearing is that of 'state's rights', or rather, the desire for states to handle matters traditionally managed at the Federal level.  This is because corporate money goes further in states than it does in a Democratic Congress, so that's where corporate lobbying is moving.

For instance, rather than wanting to face the new Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell, Verizon and company are trying to push to get state franchising laws in place that do not include net neutrality protections.  Last cycle, these companies worried that the process for passing Federal laws was too slow, and now they are trying to block Federal legislation so that they can get what they want at the state level.

Usually these companies try to get a bill passed in a state, and it doesn't protect net neutrality and it allows them to only serve certain communities with cable while bypassing others.  This is the case in Michigan, where the telcos are trying to design their futuristic bad-service-for-some/no-service-for-many network.  Savetheinternet.com was there to protest, the state Senate looks like it's going to have an important vote tomorrow.

Tuesday, a mix of Michigan consumers and diverse special interest groups held a rally at the state house in Lansing to protest a pending state law, the "Michigan Video Franchising Bill," which would allow phone companies to bypass cities and counties for TV service approval. The state's lower chamber passed the legislation last week, and the State of California passed similar legislation in October.

But opponents, including Google and consumer groups, say the bill will allow telecoms to sidestep consumer protections, cherry-pick which communities get high-speed broadband and video services, and ignore principles of "Net Neutrality" (which require Internet service providers to offer equal access to all Internet sites).

I'm going to have more soon about the immediate counterstrike against the recent populist elections.  For now, if you live in Michigan, use this nifty tool to call your state Senator.

And get ready to be really mad at the FCC and Kevin Martin.  These are some seriously bad people, and now that we won an election, we have some tools to make them face the music.

There's more...

When we won a Congressional majority, I immediately said that I don't expect a lot from this Congress. The attempted and silly knee-cappings of Pelosi are a reflection of an identity crisis that will not be easily solved. My signpost is net neutrality, a clear issue that we worked on, that we care about, and that is the bedrock for a progressive strategic advantage. Despite our work, I expect that net neutrality protections are going to have rough sledding in this Congress.  As long as the issue is alive, there will be no discrimination by the telco companies, so the fight itself is critical, and we will win eventually (if not this session).  I also expect a different and more complex debate on the internet than we had last time, one that brings in a whole new slew of infrastructure issues. I'm going to be paying attention to this fight, because it will be a reflection of our Democratic caucus's character.

It'll be an interesting ride.  There are a lot of choices this group of leaders will make; they will either pay attention to the populist progressive wave that elected their majority, or they will move to appease the DLC constituency that worked against them in the 1990s and over the past six years.  For a variety of cultural reasons, I suspect that the latter path is a bit more likely, though that's by no means clear.  There's evidence on both sides.

On the DLCish side, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank are moving to put a partial repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley on the agenda. This is ostensibly a reaction to New York's declining position as a financial center, which right-wingers are attributing to cumbersome regulations.  My suspicion is that New York's decline has more to do with the disastrous strategic position of America's military along with our dangerous reliance on Chinese capital.  A friend told me that over two days last week Christie's auction house did $1 billion of business, with much of it Chinese and Russian money.  That has nothing to do with Sarbanes-Oxley.  Still, it is convenient for Schumer to pay back his contributors for their DSCC help, and for Frank to set up his possible Senate run in 2008 for Kerry's seat by appealing to this lucrative donor set.  There's a lot of money in dem dar financial circles.

On the other hand, there's a real popular movement against inequitable power relationships.  The janitor's stunning victory in Houston is majorly important; unions in the South are rare, and unions in Texas are often crushed by an incredibly reactionary political system.  That the janitors won with popular support in that city shows that the themes Jim Webb wrote about in his stunningly populist Wall Street Journal Op-Ed are real and resonant.  Here's a recently elected Senator-elect sounding a lot like our newest socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders, and here's the working poor winning the hearts and minds of a Texan city.

The trend of moving against unfair economic practices and the inequitable power relationships they spring from is real.  And it was the backbone of last cycle's net neutrality fight, which is about the public's desire to treat the internet as the commons it is presumed to be.  The ideal solution for business and political elites would be to recognize this new force in American society and alter their practices to accommodate it.  We all want an open universal broadband network that all can hook into, so there's no structural conflict as long as we can inject putting public money into a resource that the public wants.

This accomodation might be possible, though again we will have this DLC-populist conflict in play in pretty clear sight.  John Dingell, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a staunch net neutrality proponent last cycle, has just hired Gregg Rothschild to be his Committee Chief of Staff for the Energy and Commerce Committee.  Rothschild is great on energy, he's great on prescription drugs, and media, and other issues the committee handles.  He's also a former Verizon lobbyist and in that role he was a vicious opponent of net neutrality.  That could mean that Dingell is no longer serious on net neutrality, and that he's going to accommodate himself to the telecom lobby.  Or it could ideally mean that Dingell has hired the perfect ambassador to the telecom industry, the one would can explain to Verizon and AT&T that they must accept an open and neutral network, and in return for this the public will put in the funds to build a really massive and effective broadband infrastructure.

I'll be interested to see what happens.  Energy and Commerce is a big and important committee, and I'll watching to see if Dingell drops net neutrality as an issue, or if Rothschild can play the role ambassador to big business from the public that I hope he will.  The netroots and the progressive movement isn't going away, and we have to make sure that our legislators write laws that are for the benefit of all of us, not simply any one sector full of campaign contributors.

There's more...