Monday, Jan. 18, 2010

If climate change is a “hoax,” as the right wants us to believe, why are coal and oil companies girding for Armageddon with a troop surge of energy lobbyists? According to the Center for Public Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change increased fivefold since 2003 to 2,810. That’s five lobbyists for every Washington lawmaker. Only 138 promote alternative energy.

If studies undermining the science of global warming sound familiar, it’s because they descend from tactics the tobacco industry employed for decades to keep regulators at bay.
Fox’s Sean Hannity called 2009 – fifth-hottest year of the past 130 – “one of the coldest years on record.” Never mind 11 of the hottest years on record occurred in the past 13.
Global sea ice bigger than Texas and California combined melted. A Heritage Foundation study framed the climate bill as a job-killing national energy tax that would drive up prices.

Predicted were electricity rates spiking 90 percent, gas prices soaring 74 percent and the average energy bill rising $1,500 a year while another 2.5 million jobs vanished. Yet the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, analyzing the same measure, pegged the cost at $175 a year.

Lobbyists found an ally in a Republican Party determined to deny President Obama any legislative success even if it meant putting partisan politics ahead of our planet.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, former House energy committee chairman, likened the GOP battle plan to “guerrilla warfare,” promising “crafty attacks” on the climate bill. Talking points claimed the climate bill would cost every American family $3,100 annually in higher energy prices – 10 times a $340 estimate in an MIT study. Coal is the nation’s largest contributor to global warming, yet look how much attention it bought with an $18 million ad campaign touting “clean coal” technology which doesn’t yet exist.

Warren Buffett is so sure of the cap-and-trade outcome, the Oracle of Omaha, who advised Obama during the financial crisis of November 2008, invested in continued coal pollution with a $26 billion acquisition of the Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railroad.

Exxon reportedly spent $100 million on ads touting $10 million in renewable energy investments.

Not only did special interests have to contend with changeover from George W. Bush to Obama, they had to insure nothing meaningful happened in Copenhagen – a failure Pope Benedict XVI denounced Jan. 11. In a speech, the pontiff criticized “economic and political resistance” to fighting ecological degradation.

Officials from 193 countries attended the summit, which ended Dec. 19 without producing a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the non-binding accord contains few concrete steps to contain climate change.

Obama could not move quickly due to the mess he inherited from the Bush administration – bailing out Wall Street, keeping the auto industry afloat and winning approval for a $787 billion stimulus package. But when push came to shove, Obama made health care, a more populist issue, the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. Then there’s Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He championed “cap and trade” in 2003 with Joe Lieberman. Now he belittles it as “cap-and-tax” and his GOP colleague, Lindsey Graham, who courageously partnered with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to call in the New York Times in October for Republicans and Democrats to work together on climate legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., praises McCain as a “fabulous team player, on message and effective.”

For decades Republicans preached free market virtues. Cap-and-trade proposed to cut pollution by harnessing market power. Now, conservatives demonize such a market-based solution as an instrument to impose socialistic control. “They are going to take our financial systems,” Glenn Beck warned, “then they are going to nationalize energy. Those who support the measure have exposed themselves quite honestly, I think, as treasonous.”
Jeff Goodell, completing his second book on climate change for April publication, concludes lobbyists’ “most disturbing achievement” is their success at lowering our expectations.

While activists imagine bringing all of America’s resources to bear on this crisis like the World War II effort, Goodell writes, “It may be easier to defeat a dictator like Hitler than to overcome internal threats to our future as powerful as Big Coal and Big Oil.

“Despite the near-certainty of a climate catastrophe, there are no crowds marching in the streets to demand action, no prime-time speech from President Obama.”

Polls show three in four Americans support some kind of climate legislation. The fourth must be a Fox pundit.