If the Democrats liked health care, they will love cap and trade.
An expensive and divisive attempt to fix a problem that, if we trust the polls, most Americans don’t think exists, the cap and trade bill that is next on the Democratic agenda has all the hallmarks of a historic train wreck. Right now, the Democrats are sleep walking toward catastrophe on this one; if the White House doesn’t act and fast, cap and trade will further undercut the President’s standing and undermine Democratic prospects come November. Fortunately, there’s a window in which he can act; President Obama needs to move quickly and decisively to take control of this while he can.
Whatever the policy merits (and while climate skeptics want no policy at all, the ‘climate community’ is divided on the issue, with many preferring a carbon tax to cap and trade), this was always going to be a political headache for the White House. Cap and trade legislation would pick winners and losers across the economy; both voters concerned about home-state jobs and industry groups with special interests are going to make this legislation a long and ugly slog.
Worse, despite all the happy-clappy talk about ‘green jobs’ it was always going to be hard to get public enthusiasm for a bill designed to raise the costs for significant sectors of the American economy. Moderate Senate Democrats from red-leaning states are even more reluctant to go out on a limb for cap and trade than they are for health care–and the filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate would be very hard to get.
It is shaping up to be an ugly choice. Fresh off the health care bill, do you infuriate your environmentalist base and complicate the President’s international agenda by quietly backing off from cap-and-trade–or do you and the congressional Democrats spend another year on another controversial, complicated, lobby-driven (and quite possibly doomed) bill that doesn’t create jobs in the short term and that nobody understands?
Fortunately for the President, though possibly not for the planet, developments overseas in the last few days may have taken the last, quivering momentum out of the global drive for a binding agreement on global warming. With a bit of luck and skill the White House can seize the mantle of leadership on the climate issue while avoiding the pain and anxiety of supporting a particular bill.
While Americans were watching Massachusetts, the prospects for serious global action on climate change were melting faster than the glaciers in the Himalayas. This isn’t hard to do; despite confident and apocalyptic IPCC predictions of their imminent demise, the Himalayan glaciers are actually doing well. In a scandal potentially far more damaging than the release of injudiciously worded emails from prominent climate researchers last November, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been forced to withdraw the prediction that the Himalayan glaciers, vital elements of a watershed on which hundreds of millions of Asians rely, would disappear by 2035.
It’s always embarrassing to withdraw a prediction, but this is worse than most. The prediction was very high profile: a leading element in the case many advocates made that climate change was an urgent, immediate problem that had to be addressed right away.
Worse still, the prediction was based on hot air. There were no peer reviewed studies, no scholarly sources, just some off the cuff remarks by a not-very-well known climate scientist in a popular magazine. Knowledgeable experts tried to alert the IPCC to the totally bogus nature of the prediction – their concerns were ignored. The IPCC chairman then attacked critics of the published estimate as practitioners of ‘voodoo science.’ The collapse of this house of cards is not only a humiliating comeuppance; it raises extremely grave and serious doubts about the reliability of other headline predictions in the report. Were there other facts that the IPCC thought were ‘too good to check’? And can we rely on the IPCC’s assurances that there aren’t?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. We can’t.
It gets worse. A chief proponent of the bogus science turns out to be TERI, an Indian research center whose director is–Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC. Pachauri’s institute has used this bogus prediction repeatedly and aggressively in its literature and its fundraising. As recently as January 15, 2010, just 5 days before the IPCC withdrew the prediction, TERI was boasting of receiving £310,000 ($500,000) from the Carnegie Corporation and the “lion’s share” of a £2.5 million ($4.03 million) from the European Union for its work on the disappearing glaciers.
There is no evidence that Chairman Pachauri has done anything legally or ethically wrong and a full investigation may and hopefully will clear him completely–but based on what we know now it is hard to argue that this is the performance of a man who is both competent and honest. Even if Pachauri steps down, the IPCC and the climate science community will face substantially higher levels of skepticism and mistrust from an abused public. In the meantime, attention has shifted away from science and climate issues towards issues of trust; fairly or not the combination of ‘glaciergate’ and ‘climategate’ has given climate skeptics a major boost.
Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the chances for significant action by India and China have precipitously fallen. New Delhi this week was not just the site of angry exchanges between IPCC chair Pachauri and his critics, it was the setting for a meeting of the Basic countries (Brazil, South Africa, China, India) whose agreement is crucial to any global climate agreement.
The Chinese representative shocked the press by telling reporters that we need to keep “an open mind” about whether human activity is responsible for climate change. The BASIC countries agreed that the Copenhagen agreement was in no way binding. China, India and other rapidly developing countries have clearly been less than enthusiastic about accepting any limits on their future growth. A Chinese government whose hold on power depends on sustaining growth rates of eight to ten percent per year into the indefinite future can only go so far. India faces similar constraints and politicians in the world’s largest democracy can never look as if they are willing to sacrifice Indian living standards to please environmental activists in the wealthy world.
The threat of Himalayan glacier melt had actually helped build a significant constituency to take the climate issue seriously in India; the collapse of the Chicken Little glacier prediction weakens those Indians who wanted to meet Europe half way. At the same time, the growing disarray on the international politics of the issue makes it easier for reluctant countries to delay and resist — and for industry to lobby against unwanted restrictions. It seems likely that neither India nor China will now move very far; in that case there is virtually no chance that the United States Congress will pass the kind of restrictive legislation the green lobby seeks. With both President Obama and congressional Democrats on the defensive already, the White House simply cannot afford to lead a losing battle on a divisive issue like this one. Climate skeptics newly energized by the shenanigans at the East Anglian email server and now at TERI and the IPCC will gleefully go after the administration on this issue hammer and tongs.
So what should the President do? Giving up will infuriate his base and presumably violates his own sense of duty to the country and the world. Yet going forward as if nothing had changed will be tremendously damaging politically — and is unlikely to result in legislation that is worth all the trouble. Some suggest that he manage the issue through the EPA’s newly assumed power to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. Is this really a good idea? Should bureaucrats be cutting jobs by placing new regulations on industry during an election-year unemployment crisis?
More usefully, the President should recognize that a combination of poor decisions, poor communications and bad luck has compromised the ability of the climate science community to convince the public both about the nature of the threat and the steps needed to cope with it. The best approach under the circumstance would be to appoint a high level commission including prominent scientists who are skeptical of the climate change evidence to review the evidence from top to bottom. The community of climate skeptics has raised a number of concerns; some are clearly rather weak but others, as we see from the IPCC retraction of the glacial melting prediction, may have more merit.
We have reached a point where without a thorough and transparent review of the evidence and controversies surrounding it, we are unlikely to get a political consensus in the United States that can deal with this matter appropriately. And if the United States cannot act, the Basic countries will certainly not.
A thorough, transparent and impartial review of the climate change debate will take time. Many environmental activists will be enraged by this, arguing that the planet simply cannot afford the delay. They may well be right — but delay is inevitable. The world has many different countries, with many different sets of interests and many different political systems and public opinions. The growing disarray of the international effort, combined with the political obstacles under current circumstances for strong legislation in the US have made delay inevitable in any case.
Not everyone will be convinced by such a commission. But it now represents the best hope of developing a broad political consensus in the United States and given the reality of our institutions and culture, there is simply no way for us to go forward without it.
Working with leaders of both parties, with skeptics and supporters of the IPCC position on global warming, President Obama should appoint a presidential study group on climate and give it what, in the opinion of its members, is an appropriate time frame and mandate. The panel would presumably review the evidence for climate change and the methods used to assess it, the arguments for and against the role of human activity as opposed to natural variation in climate, and the arguments concerning the impact of continued climate change and the various risks and costs associated with different strategies for dealing with it. If there are further errors in the IPCC reports, the commission will find them; if there is evidence that the ‘climategate’ emails were part of a process that successfully distorted the scientific assessment of data, that will come out — and if these scandals are inconsequential that too will emerge from the review. The evidence of the commission and its methods should be fully available to the public and its deliberations should be on the record. The commission should be candid about the inevitable gaps and limits in its knowledge and its forecasts, not seeking to tilt the political discussion either way. The members must be carefully vetted for conflicts of interest. The role of advocacy needs to be clearly separated from the role of fact finding. Minority views must be treated with respect and care.
It is not clear that a commission of this kind can work — but it seems clearer every day that nothing else looks any more hopeful.
For the President and Democrats generally, this course of action seems attractive. For one thing, it might work and create the political consensus that would ultimately allow the administration to get the kind of authority it needs at home and abroad to tackle this issue with any hope of success. For another, it offers the President a chance to show the kind of leadership which many of those who voted for him hoped to see: cerebral, evidence based, post partisan, patient. And finally, it offers a dignified alternative to what looks to be another messy battle that, by the time it finished in almost inevitable failure, would likely make the White House and Democrats generally nostalgic for the good old days when all they had to worry about was health care.