This just in from a story in The Washington Times by Stephen Dinan:
President Bush is poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include.
Specifics of the policy are still being fiercely debated, but Bush administration officials have told Republicans in Congress that they feel pressure to act now because they fear a coming regulatory nightmare. It would be the first time Mr. Bush has called for statutory authority on the subject.
Has the nation's pre-eminent climate change delayer had a change of heart? No, not really; seems he's developed a late-term ability to read the handwriting on the wall. And both sides of the aisle have reason to be unhappy.
Dinan got some quotations from the usual anonymous source close to the project, who says that there are still arguments at the White House over the direction the legislation will take. "It is not clear exactly what Mr. Bush will propose, the administration source said," reports Mr. Dinan.
The source went on to say,
"This is an attempt to move the administration and the party closer to the center on global warming. With these steps, it is hoped that the debate over this is over, and it is time to do something."
This is remarkable for its admission that the party is nowhere near the center of public sentiment on this issue. After neocons have spent decades of representing sound progressive policy as being out on the radical fringe, this seems to me a refreshing and telling admission.
Dinan's source also said we can expect an announcement this week. Dinan's story goes on to note that when they were briefed, Republican members of Congress let White House officials know that they think this policy initiative is a mistake. They fear what a Democratically controlled Congress would do with a climate change bill.
Evidently Congressional Republicans aren't taking the longer, more pragmatic view that the Bush Administration is taking. Not that Bush is turning visionary statesman here: the implicit logic seems to be, better the devil you know, this term and this Congress, than the one you don't.
A Democratic President and a Democratically controlled Congress might actually pass far-sighted and effective legislation designed to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions to an ecologically sustainable level--a possibility that has always been anathema to Republican stalwarts for a variety of reasons.
First, Republicans held that Greenhouse gas emissions legislaton wasn't necessary because global climate change was a crackpot theory, not an established fact; then they argued that such policy wasn't necessary, because although climate change became an established fact, we couldn't be sure that it was being caused by humans. Now that it's clear that human exhausts are the primary cause of climate change, they argue that policy isn't necessary because doing anything about global climate change will be too costly.
Note that in making the latter case about costs, Republicans never count the costs of NOT doing anything, which are enormous. They suppose that in the absence of climate change legislation, life and economic production will perk along as they've been doing for a generation or two now, ever since humans discovered the trick of turning fossil fuel into mountain-moving work and ultimately into wealth. They think that this particular economic party can continue forever--an infinite project on a finite planet. They defend this doomed status quo not with actual cost-benefit analysis, but by comparing the costs of today's climate-change apples to the price of nineteenth-century, the-planet-is-infinite oranges.
Have Bush and his top aides had a change of heart? Do they get that the dream of infinite economic growth on a finite planet is a worn and damaging and dangerous idea? Have they come to understand the subtleties of cost-benefit accounting--a subtlety that says that the only useful comparison puts the all the costs of your options onto the table?
In a word, no. One indication that Team Bush still doesn't get it came from Whitehouse spokesperson Dana Perino, who spoke about the need to "work to solve the problem without harming the economy."
As a proud member of our country's reality-based citizenry, I offer her this bit of reality: as we lose the phenomenal Energy Return on Energy Invested ratio that we've had in the Era of Oil, and as we come to the sad end of our ability to draw down natural capital in order to transform it into wealth, believe you me the economy will change. The economy is going to suffer "harm" whether we act on global climate change or not. Acting on global climate change will minimize the harm, not eliminate it altogether.
The best chance we have of creating a sustainable industrial economy with a high standard of living is to pursue two related policies immediately and vigorously: control carbon output, and seek to build the infrastructure we need for an economy that runs on sustainable, renewable energy sources. These are huge tasks, and the changes that they instigate will ripple throughout every aspect of our culture--just as cheap oil, as it came online in the twentieth century, had a profound impact on every aspect of our culture.
I doubt Bush's proposal is motivated by any new and better understanding of the ecological and thermodynamic roots of economic activity, or of the ecological consequences of unsustainable economic activity with its unavoidable dissipation of degraded matter and energy into the ecosystems that support human life. Bush's global climate change initiative seems motivated by two things: a pragmatic recognition of the strength of the sentiment and political power arrayed behind the movement to do something about climate change, and a vain effort, certainly done with a weather eye on the judgment of history, to establish himself as some kind of leader on global climate change.
The first motivation is a startling departure for this administration. It's true that a concerted national policy would make unnecessary the state-by-state approach to control of GreenHouse Gas Emissions, an approach that business and corporate leaders recognize is inefficient. They'd prefer to focus on meeting one set of laws and regulations, rather than having to gear up to handle fifty separate state policies. (Suddenly, no doubt through being tutored by the corporate interests who funded his campaigns, the Bush Administration has come to appreciate the virtues of Federal action.....) As White House spokeswoman Perino put the case:
"The embedded regulatory trajectory that we're on is a train wreck."
So the Bush administration has taken one giant step toward recognizing reality. But this game of mother-may-I is far from over; the Bush administration has been so blinded by the confines of its own aggressively ideological mindset that even after a giant step they're far from where they need to be for effective policy. Things to watch for in the proposed legislation:
Does it make effective use of market incentives, either through a carbon tax or an effectively administered market in carbon permits? If the latter: will the permits be auctioned or sold equitably (and to the benefit of the Federal Treasury), instead of being handed out as grants to existing carbon pollutersm, validating for them their privilege to pollute the public commons at no cost?
Are the rates of carbon emissions consistent with the goals that have been articulated internationally, or are they too low to have a significant impact?
In the absence of international unanimity, will the U.S. nevertheless proceed to act on its own? That is, will the legislation acknowledge the carbon reduction goals set by international treaty, and aim to abide by them, or will there be a "trigger" clause that holds US action in abeyance until China and India do something equivalent?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no," then we can be sure that the bill is designed not to deal with global climate change, but to do something else: to serve corporate interest by heading off the impetus for effective change.
The actual language of the bill is the only thing that will let us judge the quality of Bush's initiative. His late-in-the-game attempt to secure a spot as a world leader on this issue, and his equally late-in-the-game recognition that some control of Greenhouse Gas Emissions is coming whether Republicans like it or not, aren't particularly noble motivations, and they are unlikely to lead his Administration to produce a satisfactory bill. Environmentalists are justifiably concerned that a bad bill is worse than no bill.