Why the Senate's Renewable Electricity Standard Stinks

Last week, environmentalists were treated to the glorious news that two of our esteemed Senators had introduced a bill to require that electric utilities produce 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2021.

When I learned of this wondrous development, clouds above me parted, I heard hosannas from on high, and little birdies flew down and landed on my shoulder.

Do you detect a note of sarcasm?

This bill is a total capitulation. It’s beyond a compromise and should be defeated.

What? An environmental advocate opposing the renewable electricity standard?

That’s right. And here’s why:

In 2008, President-elect Obama told 60 Minutes he considered comprehensive energy reform one of his top three priorities for the first year of his administration. As a candidate, he’d argued for cap-and-trade — a strong bill that auctioned off greenhouse gas emissions permits rather than giving them away (which many analysts saw as a free license for utilities to pollute).

Now we’re nearing the end of President Obama’s second year in office, and after he backed down on the permits issue, cap-and-trade died in the Senate — with no public complaint from the White House. The president met behind closed doors with Democratic and Republican Senators after the House passed a bill, but, as Maine Republican Susan Collins told Politico on Thursday, “There was no follow up [from the president]. There was no attempt to identify consensus provisions [or] to explain to the American people what the goal was, why it mattered, how it was linked to jobs and the economy and specifically how we could get there."

In so doing—and it was the same story with health care and financial reform—the administration somehow ceded the framing of the debate to Republicans. This is all the more mysterious given how successful it was at setting the terms of the campaign in 2007-2008. Hillary Clinton and then McCain were, as a result, always in response mode, and never able to attack—just like Sen. John Kerry was in 2004.

The Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) bill amounts to total retreat, from the strong position of candidate Obama to a cowering President Obama. It’s another instance of the president turning his back on the base that elected him — whom his staff has called “retards” who “ought to be drug tested”— in a feeble, pointless attempt to curry favor with a disloyal minority whose policies were completely repudiated by a popular mandate less than two years ago.

Do you think the Tea Party would stand for this politics of cowardice? Republicans will risk a majority in Congress rather than support incumbents with whom they disagree on any number of issues, from abortion to taxes. When was the last time liberals or greens drew a line in the sand the way the right wing of the GOP routinely does? And what has this strategy gotten us? The best climate change bill this country has ever seen, the BTU tax, was defeated in 1993.

The second reason to kill the bill is that it’s actually worse than nothing. As has been noted here previously, the U.S. already averages about 12 percent renewables; getting to 15 in the next 11 years is a foregone conclusion. The low standard could actually slow the development of clean energy.

Politically, the bill is a setback in two ways. There’s a tendency in Congress to tackle an issue (however ineffectively), then set it aside for years, if not decades. In 2008, for instance, Congress laudably expanded aid to states to provide health insurance for children. Then, during the health care debate, experts in child health who lobbied members of Congress were told, “We’ve done kids.” Significant, cost-saving, research-backed reforms were left out of the bill as a result.

Similarly, if any RES gets through in 2010 or 2011, you can forget about cap-and-trade or any other meaningful global-warming legislation for the rest of the Obama administration (however long it lasts).

You can tell this is true by the Republican support the bill is getting. As of Friday, there were four GOP Senators signed on as co-sponsors. These are the same people who have vowed to do anything it takes politically to defeat the Obama agenda — regardless of the policy, and even if they agree with it. All of a sudden we’re supposed to believe they want to make nice? Their cynical strategy was made clear in a report by E&E on Thursday, detailing efforts to tack on to the RES bill a measure that would prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, which at this point is the Obi-wan Kenobe for reform — “our only hope” — in the foreseeable future.

The last big energy bill was passed in 2005, by a Republican House and Senate, and signed by a Republican president. It was a giant piece of corporate welfare for the worst polluters. Vice President Cheney famously met in secret with resource-extractors and allowed them to virtually write the bill themselves. Did he ask Democrats what they thought? No. Did he invite the Sierra Club to give him its point of view? Of course not. He told Congress what to do, threatened to withhold support for members' pet projects if they didn’t, and rammed the thing through Capitol Hill with an iron fist.

Senate Majority "Leader" Harry Reid and President Obama would do well to take a page out of Cheney’s playbook.

We could start making significant progress in mitigating climate change tomorrow. All we lack is the political will. If it doesn’t come from us, then who?

You can convey this message to President Obama by signing the Global Warming Education Network's letter here.

Photo credit: cliff1066 via Flickr

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