The Case for a Climate Bill
The conventional wisdom is that the chances of Congress passing a bill that puts both a cap and a price on greenhouse gases are somewhere between terrible and nil. President Obama can start to prove the conventional wisdom wrong by making a full-throated case for a climate bill in his State of the Union speech this week.Washington has been forecasting the likely death of a climate bill with renewed certainty since Massachusetts elected a Republican senator who promised to block pretty much anything Mr. Obama wants. But even before then we were hearing two reasons why a bill could not pass: The Senate won’t have any strength left when it finishes with health care, and the nation cannot afford a bill that implies an increase in energy prices.The first reason is defeatist, the second greatly exaggerated. The climate change bills pending in the Senate would not begin to bite for several years, when the recession should be over. The cost to households, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would be small. A good program would create more jobs than it cost.The list of reasons to pass a climate bill, on the other hand, is long and persuasive.Start with timing. The long-term trend in greenhouse gas emissions is up (the decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record), and the sooner emissions decline, the better. The bill passed by the House last year calls for emissions in 2020 to be 17 percent lower than they were in 2005. This is the bare minimum required to give the industrialized world a fighting chance of achieving an 80 percent reduction by midcentury, which most mainstream scientists think will be necessary to avert the worst consequences of global warming.Then there is the race for markets. China is moving aggressively to create jobs in the clean-energy industry. Beijing not only plans to generate 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, but hopes to become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy technologies. Five years ago, it had no presence at all in the wind manufacturing industry; today it has 70 manufacturers. It is rapidly becoming a world leader in solar power, with one-third of the world’s manufacturing capacity.Finally there’s the question of credibility: Mr. Obama said in Copenhagen that the United States would meet at least the House’s 17 percent target. Success in the Senate is essential to delivering on that pledge. Failure would undo many of the good things he achieved in Copenhagen, and it would give reluctant powers like China an excuse to duck their pledges.The jobs argument should impress the Senate. Yet many Democrats as well as Republicans seem willing to settle for what would be the third energy bill in five years — loans for nuclear power, mandates for renewable energy, new standards for energy efficiency. These are all useful steps. But the only sure way to unlock the investments required to transform the way the country produces and delivers energy is to put a price on carbon.Some senators understand that. John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham are trying to forge a bill with a price on emissions as its core and enough other bells and whistles to attract the necessary filibuster-proof 60 votes. They will need help. Mr. Obama is the best person to provide it.