Heather Sunday May 17, 2009 5:30amSNL knocks Arizona State University in Weekend Updates Really!?! segment for not giving President Obama an honorary degree.
Late last week, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee reached an agreement on a bill that represents Congress's first serious attempt to wrestle with climate change. Among other things, it seeks to create a cap-and-trade system that would limit the amount of greenhouse gases industries could emit, reducing America's carbon emissions by 17 percent over the next decade.But the bill has a long road to travel before it becomes law. While the Obama administration has supported the legislation, it has higher priorities this year, and getting together enough votes for cap and trade in the Senate -- where Republicans are almost unanimously opposed and many centrist Democrats remain skeptical -- will be a tall order.
But if there's a reason for supporters of climate change legislation to not be concerned about this, it is the man in charge of guiding the House bill through Congress: Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and the committee chairman. In the May/June issue of the Washington Monthly, Charles Homans looks at Waxman's record as a legislator, which includes decades of battles against the tobacco industry, a surprising series of health care expansions under the Reagan administration, and, most significantly, a decade-long fight to expand the Clean Air Act.
In fact, Homans writes, most of Waxman's accomplishments have been like the battle over cap and trade: struggles that lasted longer -- sometimes much longer -- than a single session of Congress, and were won largely based on the congressman's ability to outlast and outflank the opposition. The bid to regulate climate change is the most daunting assignment Waxman has faced -- but it is one for which he has been preparing his entire career.
Read Homans's profile of Waxman, "Marathon Man."
Krugman: The Perfect, the Good, the Planet
In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives.
Now, however, a somewhat uneasy coalition of progressives and centrists rules Washington, and staking out a position has become much trickier. Policy tends to move things in a desirable direction, yet to fall short of what you’d hoped to see. And the question becomes how many compromises, how much watering down, one is willing to accept.
There will be a lot of soul-searching later this year for advocates of health care reform. (For me the make-or-break issue is whether the legislation includes a public plan.) But right now it’s the environmental community that has to decide how much it’s willing to bend.
If we’re going to get real action on climate change any time soon, it will be via some version of legislation proposed by Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey. Their bill would limit greenhouse gases by requiring polluters to receive or buy emission permits, with the number of available permits — the “cap” in “cap and trade” — gradually falling over time.
It goes without saying that the usual suspects on the right have denounced Waxman-Markey: global warming isn’t real, emission limits will destroy the economy, yada yada. But the bill also faces opposition from some environmentalists, who are balking at the compromises the sponsors made to gain political support.
So is Waxman-Markey — whose language was released last week — good enough?
Well, Al Gore has praised the bill, and plans to organize a grass-roots campaign on its behalf. A number of environmental organizations, ranging from the League of Conservation Voters to the Environmental Defense Fund, have also come out in strong support.
But Greenpeace has declared that it “cannot support this bill in its current state.” And some influential environmental figures — most notably James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first drew the public’s attention to global warming — oppose the whole idea of cap and trade, arguing for a carbon tax instead.
I’m with Mr. Gore. The legislation now on the table isn’t the bill we’d ideally want, but it’s the bill we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bill at all.
One objection — the claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade — is, in my view, just wrong. In principle, emission taxes and tradable emission permits are equally effective at limiting pollution. In practice, cap and trade has some major advantages, especially for achieving effective international cooperation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, think about how hard it would be to verify whether China was really implementing a promise to tax carbon emissions, as opposed to letting factory owners with the right connections off the hook. By contrast, it would be fairly easy to determine whether China was holding its total emissions below agreed-upon levels.
The more serious objection to Waxman-Markey is that it sets up a system under which many polluters wouldn’t have to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases — they’d get their permits free. In particular, in the first years of the program’s operation more than a third of the allocation of emission permits would be handed over at no charge to the power industry.
Now, these handouts wouldn’t undermine the policy’s effectiveness. Even when polluters get free permits, they still have an incentive to reduce their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to someone else. That’s not just theory: allowances for sulfur dioxide emissions are allocated to electric utilities free of charge, yet the cap-and-trade system for SO2 has been highly successful at controlling acid rain.
But handing out emission permits does, in effect, transfer wealth from taxpayers to industry. So if you had your heart set on a clean program, without major political payoffs, Waxman-Markey is a disappointment.
Still, the bill represents major action to limit climate change. As the Center for American Progress has pointed out, by 2020 the legislation would have the same effect on global warming as taking 500 million cars off the road. And by all accounts, this bill has a real chance of becoming law in the near future.
So opponents of the proposed legislation have to ask themselves whether they’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. I think they are.
After all the years of denial, after all the years of inaction, we finally have a chance to do something major about climate change. Waxman-Markey is imperfect, it’s disappointing in some respects, but it’s action we can take now. And the planet won’t wait.
Clemons: Obama taps Jon Huntsman: Excellent Choice for China
Recently at a Congressional Quarterly breakfast, Political Wire blogger Taegan Goddard said that Barack Obama excels at keeping his political opposition wobbly and off balance.
Goddard is right - and Barack Obama has just pulled off another blow to the Republican party's steadiness.
Obama has just chosen Jon Huntsman Jr. -- heir to the powerful Huntsman chemical conglomerate, former Deputy US Trade Representative and Ambassador to Singapore, and incumbent Governor of Utah -- to serve as US Ambassador to China.
Years ago, former Senate Majority Leader and then US Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield said that "the US-Japan relationship is America's most important bilateral relationship - bar none."
That is no longer true.
America's relationship with China is the single most important bilateral relationship it has in its foreign policy and economic portfolios -- and Barack Obama just selected as his lead point person a rising star in Republican circles who co-chaired John McCain's presidential campaign.
I have had the privilege of knowing Jon Huntsman since 1994 and have always been impressed with his pragmatism and rejection of ideological fundamentalism.
Huntsman is a great choice for this key post. He's smart on Asia, understands business, and has a real understanding of the complexities of China's ascension on the global power ladder.
One of the potential personal downsides for Jon Huntsman is that I had always hoped that he might one day run for the presidency as a balanced, sensible Republican pragmatist. I think that his appointment as an Obama ambassador probably undermines that possibility.
Congrats to Jon -- and this simply is just a really terrific choice for which Barack Obama deserves applause.
-- Steve Clemons
- Perhaps this is why Huntsman accepted the post and decided to wait on that presidential thing. From April 29, 2009 - Benen: AN ABSURD LITMUS TEST.... .
The 2012 elections are obviously very far away, but Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman certainly seems to be running for president. This week, he's making
campaign stopsappearances in three key Michigan counties over five days.It would have been four counties, but one of them refuses to listen to what Huntsman has to say. He'd already been invited to speak in Kent County, but then local GOP activists learned Huntsman supports civil unions.
Utah Gov. John Huntsman (R), seen by many as a potential top-tier presidential candidate in 2012, has been uninvited from a local Michigan Republican club after announcing his support for civil unions between gay couples.
Huntsman is touring Michigan this week and stopping at several county party events as he slowly raises his national profile. But the Kent County Republican Party this week canceled Huntsman's appearance, with the county party chairwoman saying his appearance would amount to an abandonment of party principles.
Joanne Voorhees, chairwoman of the party in the Grand Rapids-based county, emailed party members to announce the cancellation of the Saturday fundraiser.
"The voters want and expect us to stand on principle and return to our roots," Voorhees wrote in an email. "Unfortunately, by holding an event with Gov. Huntsman, we would be doing the exact opposite."
The Campaign for Michigan Families, an anti-gay group in the state, applauded the decision and encouraged other county Republican Parties in Michigan to also disinvite Huntsman.
Keep in mind, we're not talking about an event to deliver an endorsement. Huntsman -- a conservative Republican governor from a conservative Republican state -- just wanted to stop by and talk to these folks. But since he supports civil unions -- not marriage equality, just civil unions -- they don't even want Huntsman to walk in the door.
This really isn't healthy.
Republicans in Kent County, Michigan, might want to consider a more open-minded approach. In 2004, George W. Bush won the country by 55,000 votes. Four years later, Barack Obama narrowly won the same county.
If local GOP leaders don't even want to be in the same room as a Republican who supports civil unions, this is likely to get worse.
- John Cole adds:
Jon Huntsman, you all will recall, is the Governor of Utah, and he has an
82%84% approval rating as Governor and is a very viable way forward for the current GOP. Say it again. He supports civil unions and has an 80+% approval rating. In Utah. He is conservative on almost every issue, but because he supports civil unions, he isn’t pure enough for the current GOP. A telegenic, authentic outsider who isn’t batshit insane. You would think the Republicans would be running to him. This is the big problem for Republicans. Almost the entire party apparatus at the state level has been taken over by a bunch of lunatics, and few people outside of Georgia and Texas can win a state primary and then go on to win a statewide election.
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