WASHINGTON — Hot on the heels of the health care reform bill, lawmakers will soon begin considering major climate-change legislation that the White House wants to get passed this year. But with a little more than seven months to go until Election Day, some are asking: Can the Democrats do it?
“The Democratic members, especially newly elected members, are going to be pretty reluctant to pursue an aggressive agenda,” said pollster Scott Rasmussen. Even more especially those Democrats, he says, in districts carried by Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008.
With unemployment still soaring at nearly 10 percent and with voters still digesting the new health care law, global warming doesn’t rank as Americans’ highest concern, Rasmussen says. But congressional Democrats are expected to lose seats in November’s midterm elections, and the White House and environmentalists are pushing for action while the numbers are on their side.
“It is our hope that the Senate will act this year, and we’re going to do everything in our power to support that and make it happen,” Carol Browner, director of the White House’s Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told U.S. News &World Report this week.
A spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says Reid hopes the Senate will “be able to take up” bipartisan, comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation this year.
Observers expect a bill authored by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, to be rolled out the week of April 19. It’s expected to call for reducing carbon emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 — though that target would only apply at first to electric utilities and maybe transportation fuels. Industries would be phased in later.
The big question is if lawmakers think global warming is a serious enough problem to pass an energy bill now.
“It’s going to be very different from the economy-wide ‘cap-and-trade’ approach taken by Waxman-Markey,” said Environmental Defense Fund spokesman Tony Kreindler, referring to the bill that passed the House last June.
And that difference may make the difference for passage this year, environmentalists say.
The phased-in approach “should help with some of the Midwestern Democrats,” said Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. If industries’ emissions are off the table for now, manufacturing states’ lawmakers could breathe easier. “There’s a clear path to getting a global warming bill enacted in 2010,” said Weiss, who noted that Congress has approved major legislation before elections, including amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990.
But other Democrats have serious reservations about the legislation, said Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive vice president for government affairs, and a pair of recent polls indicate that voters will need convincing that global warming deserves Congress’s full attention now.
In a Rasmussen Reports poll released Wednesday, only 17 percent of adults surveyed believe that Americans would be willing to make major cutbacks in their lifestyle to help save the environment.
A Rasmussen poll released in mid-March said the majority of U.S. voters still believe global warming is a serious problem, but the number who think it’s very serious was at its lowest level in more than a year. (Weiss, meanwhile, cites a February Pew Research Center for People and the Press survey that shows more people favor than oppose setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions.)
The big question is whether enough Democrats — and a few Republicans — believe it’s a serious enough problem to pass a bill this year. Supporters of the legislation in the Senate will need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Weiss said he believes Graham will be effective in bringing Republican senators on board. The bill will also reportedly boost domestic energy production, which may attract backers.
“They’re trying to put a full plate of options and incentives and cushions on the table,” said the Chamber’s Josten.
Democrats are looking at this fall’s elections with trepidation, and Rasmussen’s statement about being too aggressive is instructive. But on climate, it’s worth noting that the Senate bill now being discussed sets lower targets than an earlier version: 17 percent below 2005 levels versus 20 percent. So members of President Barack Obama’s party would be able to say that they’ve voted for a more-moderate bill that environmentalists also happen to like.
“A good start is getting started,” said the Environmental Defense Fund’s Kreindler. “We’re decades behind at this point.”
So, with elections coming, can the Democrats deliver a climate change bill? It doesn’t look impossible. But with partisan divisions at a pre-election pitch, it will also depend on what else is on that table.
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