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By Root 6689 0

climate change: the shift in Senate rules whereby it now requires sixty votes to shut off a filibuster and thereby pass any significant legislation such as an overhaul of our energy system. A significant majority of Democratic senators were ready to pass such legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, in President Obama’s first two years, but even though the Democrats had a sixty-vote majority, they could only muster from fifty to fifty-two votes, because oil-state and coal-state Democrats could not be brought on board. Surely, however, they could have found ten Republicans who would support such legislation or offer their own simpler alternative to cap and trade, such as a carbon tax, could they not?

After all, as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Tom in an interview in February 2007, when this legislation was being debated, it was vital for the country and his party to help produce some clean-energy legislation. “I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are thirty or younger this climate issue is not a debate,” said Graham. “It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment—and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them. You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people, you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people.”

Graham’s approach to bringing around the conservative state he represents was to avoid talking about “climate change.” Instead, he framed America’s energy challenge as a need to “clean up carbon pollution,” to “become energy independent,” and to “create more good jobs and new industries for South Carolinians.” He proposed “putting a price on carbon,” starting with a focused carbon tax rather than an economywide cap-and-trade system, so as to spur both consumers and industries to invest in and buy new clean-energy products. He included nuclear energy, and insisted on permitting more offshore drilling for oil and gas to provide more domestic sources as we make the long transition to a new clean-energy economy.

“You will never have energy independence without pricing carbon,” Graham argued. “The technology doesn’t make sense until you price carbon. Nuclear power is a bet on cleaner air. Wind and solar is a bet on cleaner air. You make those bets assuming that cleaning the air will become more profitable than leaving the air dirty, and the only way it will be so is if the government puts some sticks on the table, not just carrots. The future economy of America and the jobs of the future are going to be tied to cleaning up the air, and in the process of cleaning up the air this country becomes energy independent and our national security is greatly enhanced.” Remember, he added, “we are more dependent on foreign oil today than after 9/11. That is political malpractice, and every member of Congress is responsible.”

We have no problem with this more conservative approach. Unfortunately, Graham could not get a single Republican senator to join him when he worked out a draft bill—with senators Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry—that included a complex mechanism for pricing carbon, which was never called a tax but was tantamount to it. As The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza noted in a reconstruction of the failure by the Senate to produce an energy bill (October 11, 2010), Republican senators looking to follow Graham’s lead were bombarded with allegations that they were raising taxes and killing jobs. As a result, each and every one of them backed off, including Graham. A lot of this had to do with intra-Republican politics. Lizza reported, “Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill ‘before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,’ one of the people involved in the negotiations said. ‘He would say: The second [the Fox newscasters] focus on