Reuters analyst: Obama will not match climate rhetoric – ‘Carbon industry dead-enders and populist anti-government forces are the ones who hold sway in the GOP’
By Gerard Wynn – The author is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.
7 February 2013 (Reuters) – Climate change will not be a top issue in the United States under President Barack Obama, despite the soaring rhetoric in his Inaugural Address last month. Past failure to pass sweeping U.S. climate legislation will probably instead see his administration target modest, discrete, broadly popular measures on efficiency, fuel economy and long-term tax breaks for renewable energy. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” the President said, dedicating to the issue more than a minute of his roughly 20-minute Inaugural Address on Jan. 21. “That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God,” he said, of support for clean energy. But political advisors, scientists and climate campaigners are still digesting the previous failure to pass a climate bill in 2009/2010, after much hype and expectation. The prospects for such legislation seemed promising before the success of the Tea Party movement getting a grip on House of Representatives control via hardline Republicans. Now Obama wants to drive research and demonstration projects, buildings efficiency and use the upcoming corporate tax reform process to try to “level the playing field” for renewable forms of energy, according to Whitehouse advisor Brian Deese, deputy director of the National Economic Council, speaking two weeks ago. He could perhaps target one or two more ambitious items from a menu including a federal clean energy standard; a carbon tax; or rejection of the Keystone Pipeline. Harvard University economist Robert Stavins noted the rising polarisation in a recent blog which contrasted the passage of clean air legislation with the ill-fated climate bill. “Environmental and energy debates from the 1970s through much of the 1990s typically broke along geographic lines, rather than partisan lines,” he said. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 had 87 percent and 91 percent support among Republican and Democrat senators. The Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2009 passed the House with the support of 83 percent of Democrats and 4 percent of Republicans and never reached the Senate. Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol last month criticised environmental NGOs working under the umbrella of the pro-business U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) for misjudging an increasingly polarised Congress in the abortive climate bill campaign. They focused too much on insider bargains with business, ignoring grassroots pressure, she said in her paper, “Naming the problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming”. “The USCAP strategy was based on misplaced hopes for bipartisan bargains and a failure to grasp that support from Republicans was not going to be forthcoming. “Ideological advocates, carbon industry dead-enders, and populist anti-government forces are the ones who hold sway in the GOP (Republican Party) right now, including billionaire elites and grassroots activists fiercely opposed to any and all government efforts to fight global warming.” [more]
