Courant article L-W Bill, 6.07.08

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Lieberman Hopeful, Despite Global Warming Bill's Failure

By JESSE A. HAMILTON
Washington Bureau Chief

June 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — It wasn't really about winning, anyway. So nobody's crying over the Friday defeat of a Senate bill to counter global warming. Not even Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose name was on it.

The bill to slash industrial carbon emissions — a massive and deep-reaching piece of legislation known as the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act — was the 2008 shot at doing something about the climate warming trend. As expected, it burned out.

But the politics is in the details, and in its parliamentary demise, this bill may have set up what the governmental fix is going to look like when there's a president in office who might actually sign it.

"It may be a small step for mankind," said Lieberman, "but it's a giant step for the United States Senate."

There were some significant firsts. This is the first major climate bill that made it out of committee and into a Senate floor debate — even if it was cut short by partisan sniping. And the registered support of 54 senators marks the first time that most of the Senate was willing to get behind such a measure (including both presidential contenders Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama).

"We know we're going to have a president who is supportive of doing something," said Jessie Stratton, deputy director of Environment Northeast, a nonprofit advocacy group, who had come to Washington from Connecticut to meet with Lieberman's staff on the bill.

She wasn't terribly disappointed after the Friday morning vote came up short; she and other environmentalists were already putting their hopes into next year and the possibility of even stronger legislation. "We'd like to see something that's a far better bill," she said — especially beefing up the bill's focus on energy-efficiency improvements.

Lexi Shultz, deputy director of the climate program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed. More work on efficiency is needed, she said, and on renewable energy (natural resources like sun and wind that won't run out).

"It's clear that we couldn't have gotten the bill enacted," she said. President Bush has routinely opposed the idea of a cap-and-trade system for "greenhouse gas" emissions in which companies would buy and trade emission credits. And it was never thought likely to get through both chambers of Congress, anyway. But, Shultz said, "a hundred senators got more serious about looking at climate solutions than they ever had before."

As she and others lobbied those senators, none seemed to deny that global warming is real, she said. So, when the senators showed up on the chamber floor early Friday to announce their ayes and nays, the subsequent failure struck her as success. "This vote was about getting to the details."

The vote that killed the bill was a cloture vote, a procedural step that would have required 60 senators to vote in favor if debate on the bill were to continue. The vote went 48-36, but the yes side actually had 54. (Some didn't show up for what was an inevitable loss.)

The arguments against the bill were vigorous — and a sample of what will emerge again next year. First, the Republican opposition argued, the bill sets up a potentially enormous new bureaucracy with authority over trillions of dollars. Second, it slams industry with major costs. Third, companies will choose to move out of the country rather than comply, because the unilateral move won't be matched in other markets. And finally, many opponents argued that it wouldn't work, that its goals just aren't possible.

Lieberman and the bill's other major boosters, Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and John Warner, R-Va., spent months to convince their 54 senators. "It was worth it," Lieberman said. "The global-warming crisis wasn't created in a day, and it's not going to be solved in a day."

While this national debate boiled, Connecticut's governor actually signed the state's own emission-capping program into law this week — an even stronger measure than the failed federal bill. It's uncertain how a future federal law could interact with the state's rules, or whether it might even replace them. But for now, Gov. M. Jodi Rell termed it: "leading the way for the rest of the nation."

The last time Lieberman was defending climate legislation in the Senate, it was the similar McCain-Lieberman bill in 2005, which pulled in 38 votes. Lieberman said this week's debate "sets the table for next year." He hopes to see the question return to the Senate by the spring.

Until then, he wants the polluting industrial facilities to admit where the movement is going. "This should say to them that global-warming legislation is going to be adopted, probably next year." They have to decide, he said: keep trying to fight it, or pitch in on a solution.

Though he saw his bill struck down by party wrangling, the Connecticut senator seemed to be in a jovial mood Friday. "Fifty-four senators agreed the globe is warming," he said. "On balance, it gets our country off to a start."