The
climate change bill that was supposed to be unveiled in the Senate on Monday is
now on indefinite hold. Senator Lindsey Graham, the lone Republican supporter, walked
away from the bill because President Obama and the Democratic leadership
signaled that immigration reform may come first. Harry Reid responded
immediately to Graham’s reasoning, stating that the American people expect the
Congress to tackle both issues and there is no reason not to proceed. We’ll
know within a couple of days whether the increasingly watered-down climate
legislation has any chance of passing in the Senate this year.
That
this legislation, which passed the House almost a year ago and was one of
Obama’s main priorities, is so close to failure should be a wake-up call to
environmentalists—especially with large Democratic Congressional majorities.
The interests aligned against reducing our dependence on fossil fuel are
legion; in addition to the climate change deniers in the coal and gas industry
and the anti-science wing of the Republican Party, many Democratic lawmakers in
states dependent on fossil fuels for jobs and cheap energy are also very
resistant to change. Environmentalists need to be at the top of their game for
any comprehensive energy legislation to have a chance of passing.
Two weeks ago I described why the animosity of some environmentalists towards mainstream
economists (coupled with confusion about them) is wrong-headed: economists are
by and large strongly on the side of environmentalists, especially with respect
to climate change.
This
is not just a rhetorical issue with implications limited to bragging rights on
blogs; the stakes are extremely high. This is because the political right in
the
Think
how masterfully the Right has moved the goalposts on virtually every issue
since Obama and the Democrats took charge: a healthcare bill similar to Mitt
Romney’s is now socialism, closing Guantanamo (agreed to by Bush and McCain) is
now appeasing the enemy, and cap and trade, once the mainstream position for
addressing climate change that both Obama and McCain agreed on, is now vilified
(and McCain, with boundless hypocrisy, joins the chorus against the bill). What
we have left in the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill is extremely weak, and even
this will face an uphill struggle to pass.
Writers
like David Roberts and Bill McKibben, who routinely characterize mainstream
economics as somehow antithetical to environmental concerns, are inadvertently
spreading the exact narrative that the Right wants everybody to buy into. There
is nothing that the coal, oil, and gas lobbies, the anti-environmentalists at
the Chamber of Commerce, and the extreme libertarians at the American
Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute want more than for the public to
believe that mainstream economics oppose sensible environmental regulations
that are fair, transparent, and put a significant price on greenhouse gases.
This makes it easy to characterize those in favor of tougher climate policy as
leftists who are anti-business, anti-jobs, anti-economic growth, and
anti-competitiveness.
But
they are wrong.
The
overwhelming majority of mainstream economists favor stronger environmental
regulation on many fronts, especially climate change. It is the rightwing
economists who are out of the mainstream, who believe, contrary to basic
economic theory, that an unfettered market can solve environmental problems
despite all evidence to the contrary. There’s is not the consensus view.
By
routinely bashing mainstream economics, often through faulty reasoning,
environmentalists play into the hands of those with an-environmental agenda.
The public needs to know that most of the leading minds in economics come down
squarely in favor of strong climate change legislation, as well as efforts to
improve water quality, clean air, and biodiversity protection.
This
will only happen when environmentalists better educate themselves about
economics, and realize that it is actually one of their greatest allies.
