No Energy Plan from the ‘Party of No,’ But Plenty of Schizophrenia on Global Warming
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE: April 22, 2009
No Energy Plan from the ‘Party of No,' But Plenty of Schizophrenia on Global Warming
"Ask 15 Republicans about climate change, and you'll get 20 different answers" - Politico, 4/21/09
Tom McMahon, Acting Executive Director, Americans United for Change: "It's fascinating how in total lockstep Republicans have been in just saying ‘no' to every effort President Obama has put forward to turn the economy around - an economy left in ruins thanks to their failed policies. But, when it comes to offering any alternative plan or idea or their own, like say an energy plan, they're stepping all over each other. Rest assured, when President Obama lays out his comprehensive energy plan today to curb our nation's addiction to foreign oil, combat Global Warming and create millions of green jobs - the only clear message that will emerge from the schizophrenic Republican response today will be "No."
GOP grapples with climate confusion
By: Lisa Lerer
April 21, 2009 07:53 PM EST
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=CB17A31E-18FE-70B2-A891238C44E56397
Ask 15 Republicans about climate change, and you'll get 20 different answers.
In March, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told a national conservative radio program that the Earth is "cooling," not warming.
Last week, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said global warming iss real and hurting her state, acknowledging that "many believe" an international effort to reduce greenhouse gases is necessary.
And on Sunday, Republican leader John Boehner dismissed as "almost comical" the idea that carbon dioxide is "a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment," arguing that it must be safe because humans "exhale" it and cows deposit it.
An EPA spokesman called Boehner's comments "erroneous," noting that whether a gas is a carcinogen doesn't have anything to do with whether it causes global warming.
The GOP's scattershot messaging on climate change threatens to distract from the party's primary attack on the Democrats' global warming plan: that the cap-and-trade system will dramatically raise prices on business and consumers.
"The debate should be starting right now, and it should be all about taxes coming from climate change," said one former Republican Senate aide.
This week, 54 witnesses - including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and former Vice President Al Gore - will testify about climate change over three days of hearings before the Energy and Commerce Committee. Three weeks ago, committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey released the outlines of a cap-and-trade bill that they hope to fast-track to a full House vote by the Memorial Day recess.
But as Democrats charge forward, Republicans have yet to produce an energy plan. Boehner told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he thinks the Republicans will produce a plan on climate change, but he offered no details about what it might be or when it might come. Boehner has tasked Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence's American Energy Solutions working group with working out the details of the Republican alternative.
House Republicans are focusing on the costs of a cap-and-trade system, warning that the new regime would raise regulatory costs on businesses and increase energy prices, particularly for consumers in the Midwest.
In a briefing with reporters Tuesday, Pence called the Democrats' proposal "a declaration of economic war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill."
The ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), made similar points in his opening statement Tuesday.
"How many businesses have folded, or will fold, because of skyrocketing energy prices?" he asked. "How much higher must unemployment creep before we realize that we are sabotaging our way of life in the name of carbon dioxide?"
House Republican aides argue that there are so many lines of attack coming out of the party because there is so much to criticize.
"As House Republicans and the American Energy Solutions working group work through the process of building a taxpayer-friendly alternative to the president's cap-and-tax policy, there will be plenty to criticize in the Democrats' proposal," said Mary Vought, press secretary for the House Republican Conference.
A tightly focused economic message could help Republicans persuade Democrats - particularly those from Rust Belt states hit hard by the recession - to vote against the bill.
But Republicans also fear that their economic arguments are getting lost in a hazy mix of conflicting and sometimes confused commentary.
"If you get bogged down in the debate to what degree this bill will actually diminish or lower human-created climate change, then you lose," said Brian Darling, director of Senate Relations at The Heritage Foundation and a former Republican Senate staffer. "I would concentrate 100 percent on the tax debate."
Traditionally, splits on climate change happen more along regional, rather than party, lines. And Democrats certainly have their own internal divisions, with Rust Belt lawmakers wary of the impact a cap-and-trade system could have on energy prices for already-strapped consumers and trade-sensitive manufacturing industries such as paper and steel.
Still, most Democrats agree some action should be taken on global warming - they just disagree about the timing, mechanics and other details.
Republicans are still divided over whether global warming is actually happening.
Nowhere were the differences of opinion more apparent than in Republican responses to last Friday's proposed finding by the EPA that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. The announcement opened the door to new regulations on a huge swath of polluters, from auto manufacturers to power plants.
The highest ranking senators on the committees overseeing energy and environmental matters took radically different views on the proposed finding.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called it the "beginning of a regulatory barrage."
"The solution to this ‘glorious mess' is not for Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which replaces one very bad approach with another. Congress should pass a simple, narrowly targeted bill that stops EPA in its tracks."
But while Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, slammed the administration for "acting on its own," she stressed the need to address climate change.
"Addressing climate change is an important challenge that must be tackled, but it should be done through an open and deliberative process in Congress," Murkowski said.
Experts from both sides of the climate change debate note that Republicans are trapped in a climate change triangle. Without congressional action, the White House can authorize the EPA to impose regulations. But efforts in Congress are being led by some of the chamber's most liberal Democrats, including Waxman, Markey and California Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Outside the Capitol, business groups - a key Republican constituency - are fractured in their opposition to climate change legislation. The United States Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups, backs a cap-and-trade system that includes "a significant portion" of free allowances to help its membership - which includes General Motors, Alcoa and Shell - adopt new, less-polluting technologies. But the Chamber of Commerce, the country's most powerful business lobby, remains significantly more wary of the idea.
And Republican opinion leaders Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deride global warming as a "scam" and a "hoax." The Washington Post's George Will frequently expresses skepticism about the severity of man-made global warming.
"If they come to the table, a lot of them see political suicide because of the effect of the principled punditry," said one House Democratic aide. "A lot of the people that can unleash on them don't think it's a problem."
Roll Call: GOP Wrestles With Climate Change Bill
April 22, 2009
By Jackie Kucinich
Roll Call Staff
As hearings over climate change legislation commence this week in the House, Republicans have made known their distaste for the Democratic solution to the problem.
Their own solutions, though, remain unclear.
Earlier this year, Republicans had little choice but to agree that the economy was in crisis. Their vigorous rejection of the Democrats' economic stimulus bill, however, saddled them with the "party of no" label, which they have been fighting to shed ever since.
On climate change, Republicans are again in the tough spot of having to start the debate by conceding that the problem exists, while they watch Democrats get early traction on solving it.
"Republicans need to rally around a strong messaging alternative, and that has to be the free market and the innovation that occurs from the free market," one former GOP aide said.
House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.), head of the Republican task force charged with generating an energy alternative, indicated that many of the GOP ideas would be drawn from the American Energy Act - the bill that House Republicans pushed in the 110th Congress. That bill relied heavily on increasing domestic energy production but was criticized for its emphasis on oil drilling.
Pence criticized the Democratic bill, specifically the provision that sets a cap on carbon emissions and allows companies to trade emissions under that cap, saying the majority has no cost estimates for the proposals in the bill.
"I certainly learned in the weeks before the break that people prefer more detail in certain proposals, especially numbers," Pence said, poking fun at his own party's much-lampooned release of their first budget alternative that contained no figures.
Pence stressed that Republicans will be prepared shortly to offer their own counterproposal on energy.
"We are for clean air, we are for clean water, we are for clean energy," he said. "We are not for taxing people out of house and home."
House Republicans also claim the Environmental Protection Agency's recent move to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions will result in higher taxes, and one GOP aide said that will underscore the message that Democrats are becoming increasingly hostile to energy production.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), added that Republicans want to help address climate change but believe that there is a different way of going about it.
"House Republicans want to work with Democrats to advance policies that will promote clean air, clean water and a healthy environment, but we will oppose policies that destroy our economy and kill millions of American jobs," he said. "The idea that there is only one way to try and improve the environment, like through a job-killing cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, is flat wrong. And we believe the Democrats' plans amount to a national energy tax that will increase the costs for every single American."
Democrats contend that the money generated by the cap-and-trade proposal will reduce costs to consumers and that millions of jobs will be created in green industries as demand for new energy technologies rises in the U.S. and in foreign markets.
Global warming has been a touchy subject in Republican circles for years. It was not long ago that the words "climate change" were not in the GOP vernacular, and there are still members of the Conference that argue the problem has been wildly exaggerated by environmental groups.
Former President George W. Bush acknowledged global warming was a problem late in his presidency and was met with criticism from the right.
Some Republicans, while accepting that climate change is a problem, doubt that human-produced carbon emissions are at fault.
"The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it's harmful to our environment, is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide," Boehner said during an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "Listen, it's clear we've had change in our climate. The question is, how much does man have to do with it and what is the proper way to deal with it? We can't do it alone as one nation."
That is exactly the view that the Rev. Jim Ball, a spokesman for the Evangelical Climate Initiative, is trying to change.
"Groups that have been propagating [climate change] are not the most trusted messengers in the evangelical community," he said.
"Human-induced global warming is real," he said. "The science is about as crystal clear as you can get."