Exactly 365 days after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, we in the climate movement certainly don’t seem to have hit our stride. In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement: the compromises of ACES, the slow pace in the Senate, and the disappointment of Copenhagen have left many activists and volunteers disillusioned and unsure about the best path forward.
And now, in a year when we hoped to start anew, we suffer yet another blow: the election last night of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate seat that Ted Kennedy held for over 35 years.
Losing a vote in favor of bold, comprehensive climate legislation and replacing it with a politician who has specifically stated his opposition to a comprehensive cap and trade program is bad. Even worse is the “conventional wisdom” that cap and trade simply isn’t popular enough to pass or that the Democratic Congress will be too gun shy to move forward any legislation that would actually benefit real people with real problems.
But before we all start investing in houseboat stocks and declaring the planet permanently doomed, I think it’s important to remember a few key facts about where we are and that, as a movement, we still have immense power and certain very powerful themes on our side.
First, it’s important to note that Brown has not always been consistently opposed to comprehensive climate solutions. In fact, he voted in favor of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) as a Massachusetts state senator. He did attempt to disown that vote last fall when running in a Republican primary, but it shows that there is some possibility of dialogue.
More to the point, studies have shown a clean energy jobs bill could provide 38,000 new jobs in Massachusetts alone and 1.7 million nationwide. With America still mired in a recession and 10 percent unemployment, any senator should think twice about voting against a bill that creates jobs. That is especially true for a senator who will have an extremely tough reelection fight in 2012 and is representing a state overwhelmingly in favor of bold climate legislation.
Looking at the larger picture, we must remember that passing comprehensive climate legislation was always going to be a bipartisan endeavor. Unlike health care, the Administration’s top domestic issue, we were never going to impose complete party discipline on Senate Democrats. Republican votes are necessary to the passage of any climate bill. That means that the loss of one senator matters less for climate than it might for other issues -- even if that senator was the nominal 60th vote for the Democratic caucus.
Most important though, is not getting bogged down in the day-to-day vote-counting grind, but remembering some of the overarching themes that compelled voters towards certain politicians in the last few years of frustration and hope.
After all, Brown did not win yesterday’s election solely based on one small comment against climate legislation (or health care or any other number of specific issues). Rather, there are a number of intersecting reasons and themes that can account for his surprise victory. Among the biggest, I believe, is the fact that the Massachusetts electorate saw him as the candidate most likely to bring about change. For better or for worse, many voters in Massachusetts viewed him, like they viewed Barack Obama the previous year, as the politician most likely to shake up the status quo that they felt has done nothing to address their problems.
While it’s depressing on one level that a candidate who adopted a very anti-progressive platform could be temporarily seen as an agent of change, it’s also encouraging on another level for the environmental movement that this desperate need for change is still a dominant factor of American political life.
After all, the very heart of the clean energy reforms that 1Sky and other progressive groups are pushing are a change from the corrupting, failed status quo of Big Oil and Dirty Coal. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans want clean air and water, a clean energy economy, and an end to the threat of climate change -- and that is what our push is all about.
The most important thing we can all do right now is remind our politicians of this basic fact: we need to be as loud as possible, as active as possible, and organize as much as possible. We need to flood their offices with calls to remind them that -- contrary to some media conjecturing about the state of a Senate climate bill -- millions of Americans still firmly support a transition to the clean energy economy and warding off a climate disaster.
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January 23, 2010
3:30 PM
anne butterfield said:
With the election of Brown, it seems the R's may be waking to the reality that they need to be more than the party of NO. Here, for Mother Jones, Frank Luntz reveals how enviro's need to speak of climate and energy to win votes.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/gop-pollster-luntz-tells-enviros-sto...
Republican pollster Frank Luntz—the brains behind Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" and the man who coined politically potent phrases like the "death tax"—wants to help environmentalists in their push for legislation to combat climate change. His advice? Stop talking about climate change.
The environmental community is "fighting the wrong battle," Luntz announced on Thursday at an event to mark the release of a new report by his polling firm, The Word Doctors, outlining strategies to help marshal public support for a climate bill. "The least important component of climate change is climate change."
Luntz's report, "The Language of a Clean Energy Economy," finds that the majority of the public across the political spectrum is convinced that global warming is happening and caused at least in part by humans. But, Luntz says, talking about the problem won't win support for the legislation that would solve it. Among both Democrats and Republicans polled by his firm, addressing climate change was the least important reason to support a cap-and-trade policy.
So what should environmentalists say instead? Luntz suggests less talk of dying polar bears and more emphasis on how legislation will create jobs, make the planet healthier and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. Advocates should emphasize words like "cleaner," "healthier," and "safer"; scrap "green jobs" in favor of "American jobs," and ditch terms like "sustainability" and "carbon neutral" altogether. "It doesn't matter if there is or isn't climate change," he said. "It's still in America's best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe."
Luntz isn't the first public opinion expert to suggest this course of action—but until recently he was better known among environmentalists for furnishing the GOP with sophisticated strategies to kill any prospect of climate action during the Bush years. In 2002 Luntz authored an influential memo advising Republicans to green their public image while sowing public confusion about global warming. Republicans should "continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate" because otherwise, he warned, "[s]hould the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly." Two Bush initiatives that were vintage Luntz: the timber-industry-friendly "Healthy Forests Initiative" and the "Clear Skies Act" that loosened restrictions on polluters.
Many Republicans still seem to be working from Luntz's playbook. But he acknowledged at Thursday's event that the effort to muddy the public discussion over the science of climate change had failed. "It doesn't matter whether you call it climate change or global warming," he said. "The public believes it's happening, and they believe that humans are playing a part in it." In fact, Luntz warned that if Republicans continue to dispute climate science it could hurt them politically. Instead, he said, the GOP should be engaging in the debate over to solve America's energy problems. "You have to do something new, and you have to do it better," he said. "If you are representing the polices of the past, you will be kicked out."
Now that Luntz has changed course on climate, is his advice to environmentalists any better than his former counsel to the GOP? As it happens, many advocates of climate legislation have already started moving in the direction that Luntz is proposing. The cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last year is titled the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," and the version currently circulating in the Senate version is called the "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act." (The Senate bill even eschews any talk of cap-and-trade, though Luntz balked at the Democrats' alternative term—"Global Warming Pollution Reduction and Investment"—because it uses the words "global warming.") President Barack Obama rarely talks about climate, focusing instead on jobs and economic growth. So far, though, all the positive spin hasn't made the hard task of passing legislation any easier.
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