No Progress Yet in the U.S. Government on Climate Change

Have the Democrats really decided to try to get a bill on climate change passed before the end of the year? That’s the question experts in Washington are asking themselves, following the report on Monday, April 26, on the presentation of the proposed bill on which Sens. John Kerry (Democrat), Joe Lieberman (Independent) and Lindsey Graham (Republican) have been working for six months.

The interruption was abrupt. Everything was ready for the Senate press conference when the Republican published a letter on Saturday announcing his decision to withdraw from the group. Mr. Graham reproaches the Democrats for wanting to get a bill on immigration reform passed before one on climate change for political reasons. “Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,” he accused.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who faces a difficult re-election in Nevada, denied accusations that he front-loaded the immigration debate because he needed the support of Latinos. John Kerry, for his part, attempted to reassure that the proposed bill has not been buried, in an editorial posted on the Internet on Monday: “We’re still pushing, we’re still talking, we’re still fighting,” he wrote.

Whatever the outcome, for the environmentalists, the decision had the effect of a cold shower. “It is crucial that the process continues. We need this law,” explains Franz Matzner, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The White House has refused to prioritize, affirming that it has the intention of bringing the two subjects to the forefront. But political analysts doubt the Senate’s ability to examine two such controversial texts simultaneously.

The contents of the text on which the three senators were still working at the end of the week at the White House with the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, were not divulged. According to the sparse components the associations gathered, the text does not adopt the same approach as the Waxman-Markey Bill the House of Representatives passed in spring 2009, and it does not include the same system of global emissions cap and trade, but it retains the goal of reducing the United States’ emissions, as affirmed during the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 (by 17 percent in 2020 as compared to 2005 and by 80 percent before 2050).

The authors chose a sector-by-sector approach, hoping to diminish political opposition. The emissions cap would begin by being applied to enterprises in the energy sector, beginning in 2012.

Four years later, the industries would be integrated, followed by transportation. This last point is the thorniest. The negotiators apparently hesitated between imposing either a tax on petroleum products or an obligation on companies to buy emissions quotas that would be indexed according to their production. Analysts think this discussion is linked to Mr. Graham’s decision to withdraw, because he did not feel supported by the Republicans and the petroleum industry enough to continue.

The environment’s defenders are waiting, perplexed. They gather that the American president, Barack Obama, gave all the signs necessary to show his spirit of compromise: by raising financial support for the nuclear sector, by making deep-sea drilling possible and by raising investment in carbon capture and stocking technologies. They also noted that on Monday Graham was not opposed to the proposed bill being sent for analysis to the Environmental Protection Agency. This agency has six weeks to present its conclusions.