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Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2009 Archive / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive
Plans Are Important, But So Is Execution
September 22, 2008
Which presidential candidate has the best plan for fighting global warming?
A fair question. But an equally important question, which often gets lost in the fog of media campaign coverage, is, which candidate is best positioned to get a reasonably strong climate bill passed into law?
That question is important because climate change is vexing in its policy complexity, which gives rise to daunting politics – a witch's brew of partisan divides, regional differences, and allegiances to home-state industries.
Add a generous helping of institutional jealousies between old bulls in Congress and an Executive Branch with a new chief, coupled with politicians' egos, and the difficulty of keeping a climate bill from running into the sand becomes apparent.
Whoever is president will need to bring to bear strong bargaining skills and a knack for building cross-party relationships in order to keep a climate bill on track.
The most likely scenario is for Congress to adopt a cap-and-trade system, which would set a national limit on greenhouse gas emissions and create a market in tradable emissions allowances. For every ton of carbon dioxide that a business emits, one allowance would have to be turned in.
Because allowances would be limited in number, they would have scarcity value, giving businesses an incentive to adopt the most cost-effective emissions reduction strategy.
But negotiating the details of the cap-and-trade system will be tricky. One example: How should allowances be distributed at the outset? Give them away, auction them off, or some combination of the two?
Industries that use a lot of energy argue that their allowances should be free because meeting emissions reduction requirements will be very costly. One aluminum smelter's pot lines use enough electricity to power a small city. A glass factory can burn through half a million dollars of natural gas every month to keep its furnaces lit.
Economists and environmentalists can argue until their veins throb purple that auctioning is the most equitable, efficient way to distribute allowances. But heavy industries will have the ear of their members of Congress, whether they're Republicans or Democrats. And those congressmen will carry industry's message to the bargaining table, whether the president is named McCain or Obama.
There will be many such knotty issues to be resolved. At that point, the main question is not which of the two candidates had the best plan in ’08, but which one has the political chops to pull a bipartisan deal together with Congress and make it stick.
John McCain has a record of building bipartisan support for bills that tackle difficult issues. Barack Obama, not so much.
An important consideration for weighing the choices this year and next.
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