As you know, there has been a tremendous amount of activity on climate change and energy on The Hill over the past year. The House of Representatives got going fast, even before the 111th Congress got underway. A leading progressive, hardball-playing Congressman from Los Angeles, Henry Waxman, assumed the chairmanship of the critical Energy and Commerce in a palace coup. He created a new subcommittee, Energy and the Environment, and installed an outspoken Massachusetts progressive, Ed Markey, as the chair. In late June, after a fair bit of horse trading among key legislators – plus some old-fashioned threats, cajolery and pleading from Speaker Pelosi and her team, and, it’s fair to assume, President Obama and his team – the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka Waxman-Markey, was passed in the House. The vote was close, 219-212, but historic nonetheless. There are extraordinary complexities to the politics, the psychology, and the economics. Nevertheless, Waxman-Markey has become the touchstone for legislative action.
Next stop the Senate. The Senate leadership, no doubt in full consultation with the House leadership and the White House, decided to put climate change and energy behind health as the focus for the summer and fall. At the end of September, two forward-thinking, aggressive legislators, both renewable energy and environmental protection hawks, John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Barbara Boxer, committee chair for Environment and Public Works, started to turn up the tempo on climate change and energy. They introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. Boxer’s committee will hold three days of hearings this week, and mark-up on the bill is slated to commence the first week of November.
In her announcement of the release of the first full working draft of the bill, Boxer noted that a new EPA analysis showed no discernible difference between Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey in their economic impact on the average American household: $80 to $111 per year.
This climate change/energy initiative, so critical to the health and well being of the United States – much more so, I would not hesitate to venture, than health care reform – will likely not, according to all reports, make it into law this year, let alone before Copenhagen, but there’s a pretty solid foundation being laid for it for enactment in the second session of this Congress.
The folks at the White House, with President Obama very much driving them, are working assiduously on a number of fronts to make this legislation happen. This article from the AP delves into how this is being manifested. A large and growing group of top advisors now meet regularly on Obama’s green agenda. There has been considerable outreach to mayors, governors, and members of Congress. Carol Browner, the top White House official on climate and energy said: “It’s really engaging a wide array of people across the administration to make sure that we’re answering the questions that the Senate needs answered and working with individual members as they think about how they can support comprehensive energy legislation. It’s just grown and grown and grown, with more and more Cabinet agencies and secretaries wanting to be involved.”
I’ve noted at the blog not only the Obama Administration’s selection of truly impressive environmental and energy leaders to top posts, but its emphasis on green stimulus and jobs, and the fact that it has been consistently pushing the edge of the envelope on regulatory initiatives. (See recent posts here and here, for instance.)
The President made a major speech at MIT last week “challenging Americans to lead the global economy in clean energy.” You can see the speech below.
We are, without a shadow of a doubt, making enormous progress in the US, politically and in the business community, on making the transition to clean, smart, economically stable, and conflict-free energy. More and more people every day in high places, and across the board – witness the burst of concern and action this past weekend – are getting it. Making peace with the planet, restoring the earth to balance, call it what you like: It’s happening here.
