Campaign finance reform is an environmental issue

BY JANET CONTURSI

If the insurance industry can shape the health care bill, and Wall Street can dictate financial reform, why can’t Big Polluters write climate change legislation? Well, they pretty much did.

The House’s Waxman-Markey bill (American Clean Energy and Security Act) and the Senate’s Kerry-Boxer bill (The Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act) were supposed to be Obama’s solution to global warming. But there is one pollutant even worse than coal—money. And there is plenty of money being spent to weaken these bills.

The centerpiece of Waxman-Markey is a cap-and-trade system, which the Pollution Industry prefers to a carbon tax. This is not just a happy coincidence. Waxman and Markey premised their bill on proposals from the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of electric, oil, coal and Wall Street lobbyists—plus a few environmental organizations.

Cap-and-trade allows Big Polluters to buy pollution allowances from small polluters if their own pollution output exceeds the cap. Big Polluters are betting that the cap will be so high they’ll never have to pay for their pollution messes. In the Waxman-Markey bill, they won their bet. As Greenpeace notes, “What is particularly disappointing about the 2020 cap is that to meet it will require almost no effort or change on the part of polluters.”

Roger A. Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado believes that, “Cap-and-trade is a big, fat political mess that cannot succeed in reducing emissions, but can lead to lots of benefits to many special interests. Hence it has many champions. A straight carbon tax, applied upstream in the energy economy, is a much preferable approach to help bring about the long-term de-carbonization of the global economy.”

Greenpeace wanted a strong cap and a carbon tax. Waxman-Markey contains neither. Greenpeace was one of the first groups to withdraw support for the bill. Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA sums up the bill’s failure:
“The science is clear: the United States and the developed world must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. This legislation at best provides a 4 to 7 percent cut … , and it is likely to get worse in the Senate. While 4 percent is something, it’s like building a 4-foot levee in New Orleans as the waters rush in at 40 feet.”

Even Waxman and Markey admit that their bill doesn’t go far enough to reduce emissions. So what went wrong? Money. Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, nails it:

“Special interests—including Big Oil, Dirty Coal and Wall Street—continue to hold too much sway in the Energy and Commerce Committee from which this bill emerged. In exchange for voting for this bill, conservative Democrats de-manded hundreds of billions of dollars worth of giveaways to their favorite campaign contributors. The result is a bill that doesn’t bring about anywhere near the pollution reductions necessary to avoid cataclysmic warming.”

Even some Republicans recognize the dirty dealing that went into the bill. David Jenkins from Republicans for Environ-mental Protection states:

“The integrity of this climate bill has already suffered a serious blow as a result of the parochial deal-making needed just to secure the support of Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman and Markey made dramatic early concessions—giving away 85 percent of the emissions allowances in the near term, reducing reduction targets, and allowing offsets. Those are serious concessions to secure a handful of committee votes on the Democrat side … “
The money trail is not hard to follow. Waxman and Markey released a draft of their bill to the members of the committee on March 31, 2009. In April, May and June of 2009, American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Southern Co.—all large electric utilities that rely heavily on coal—gave campaign money to 25 of the 59 committee members.

Big Polluters didn’t want to kill the bill—in fact, they supported its passage. But they wanted a weak bill that would not require them to do anything and would keep government off their backs for decades. And they got their wish.
How about the Senate’s Kerry-Boxer bill?

Environmentalists say the bill invests too little in clean energy technology, has roughly the same inadequate emissions target as Waxman-Markey, triples the subsidies for “clean coal,” and offers generous handouts for nuclear, natural gas and Big Agriculture.

More ominous is the fact that the cap-and-trade section of the bill will be shaped in the Senate Finance Committee—the same committee that stalled health care reform.

According to Anne C. Mulkern of the NY Times, “Oil and gas companies and electric utilities over the past two decades have poured $8 million into the campaign coffers of lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee who could now look to shape climate legislation.”

Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) has received the most money in the 2010 campaign cycle—$195,796 from 72 different energy interests. A moderate Democrat up for re-election, Lincoln is considered a swing vote on the climate bill. The ranking Republican on the committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), has taken $128,500 from 52 energy sources. The American Petroleum Institute and Exxon Mobil have given $10,500 to lawmakers on the committee in the current campaign cycle.
What will those contributions buy Big Polluters?

“It’s all an effort to get access,” says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “That’s what making campaign contributions provides you, is enhanced access with members of Congress. It doesn’t guarantee outcomes but it increases your odds of being able to influence the outcomes.”
When was the last time you had that kind of clout with Senator Amy Klobuchar, a member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works—the committee that gave us the Kerry-Boxer bill?

The lesson? Corporate money pollutes our political system. Cleaning up politics requires campaign finance reform—and that is an environmental issue.
Janet Contursi is a freelance writer in Minneapolis. She can be reached at greentalk@live.com.