There is a silver lining to the turmoil over the Senate climate bill.Photo: Pranav Singh via Flickr

Weird. But I felt happy. Which is weirder still. I’ve worked for almost 20 years to stop global warming, and I feel joy when the Senate global warming bill begins to unravel. How did we get here?

The bill that Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — aka KGL — keep threatening to introduce is reputed to be more of a polluters’ bill than an environmental bill. Massive new subsidies for the coal, oil, and gas industries, a new trading scheme for Wall Street (this time in derivatives of carbon pollution instead of mortgages), promised CO2 emissions reductions primarily from ungovernable “offsets” in the developing world, and preemption over state efforts to stop global warming or even the EPA’s recently Supreme Court–granted right to do the same.

There are smart people who say that we need a bill on global warming, any bill, and the rest of the world will start moving too. But it seems to me that if we pass a fake bill, it won’t be a little first step but rather the last step. And the Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians are unlikely to be so ignorant as to watch the Senate pass a fake bill and turn around and make real emissions reductions in their own economies.

But figuring this out isn’t my job. I didn’t join the environmental movement to try and become a master dealmaker. Let’s leave that to the politicians and their staffs. I’m more interested in the people building a powerful swell of public support that politicians eventually have to follow. Democracy done right means politicians listen to the people, not the coal companies or the oil companies or Goldman Sachs.

I come from the American tradition that liberated itself from a corrupt king and that now has to liberate itself from corrupt corporate oligarchs. To do that, we’ll have to organize in every corner of this fair land and peel the grip of the polluters off the levers of power. But there is one thing we must do first. The original role of the environmental community is to tell the truth. Our role is not to design ever more complex legislative schemes that enrich the oligarchs and confuse the public. The truth is that global warming is bearing down on us and we are not a step closer to solving it than we were 40 years ago.

And yet there is something that I find hopeful, an alternative bill, though the media pretends it isn’t there.

The media has been focused on the three men who have been talking about a bill for months while ignoring two women, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who have actually introduced a bill, the CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal Act). With simple, elegant architecture, it auctions the right to pollute to the importers, drillers, and miners of carbon-based fuels that come into the economy. These costs get passed along to you and me, working like a tax and increasing the price of carbon-based energy so we use less. That’s a good thing. And then it takes most of that revenue and gives a cash payment, every year, to everyone with a Social Security number.

Top Republican pollster Glen Bolger from Public Opinion Strategies recently polled 1,000 likely voters in five politically moderate to conservative states about their views on climate legislation. According to Bolger, “The CLEAR Act from Cantwell and Collins has the best chance of getting more votes over party lines because people like the concept of less government involvement [and a] tax-cuts-style refund back to the people.” Maybe this bill is a better way to get Republican support than to start giving companies the right to drill off our beaches.

I’ve got a different grievance, however. There’s no @#$&ing enforcement with Earth Day. Anyone can claim anything on Earth Day.

Sure, there are other, similarly co-opted holidays. Thanksgiving marks the day before the country’s biggest shopping day. But hell, the Pilgrims never had any real power anyway, plus weird shoes and a boxy boat. How about President’s Day, with those stupid ads of Abe Lincoln selling Chevys? Those Presidents are dead, so we can’t expect them to enforce anything.

Think about it: On Christmas, Jews and Muslims don’t try to drive an agenda that the Christians picked the wrong guy. Nah, they let it slide. Leave the day alone. On Yom Kippur, non Jews don’t walk around claiming the whole “Ten Days of Repentance” is a waste of time. No way, non Jews give them their space. How about Muslims? Nobody makes fun of Ramadan, not even Jon Stewart.

Which brings me back to Earth Day. It could have been the day we get all mushy and reverent about our Earth Mother, she who gives us our very breath. But no, it’s the perfect time for a libertarian think tank to press its campaign against the scientific consensus that has proven global warming is happening and that human activities are causing it. That’s right, the Cato Institute has been led by climate skeptic (that means somebody who thinks the Earth is flat) Dr. Patrick Michaels into questioning every conclusion about global warming. Oh yeah, and taking a little backsheesh from the fossil fuel industry at the same time.

Pat Michaels has long used out-of-context data to try and confuse the public about global warming. He said global warming wasn’t happening, then he said it was good for us, then he said it was minimal. Now he is using his perch at the Cato Institute, founded on free-market principles, to question the consensus on global warming in newspaper ads. In the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times, CATO is running a full-page ad that starts with this line from President Obama — “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.” — and then screams in large font, “With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.”

A long list of Ph.D. scientists have signed on to the ad, supposedly to add heft to the contrary opinion. Unfortunately for Cato, the list is wrought with professional global-warming naysayers and discredited academics.

Between the signer who espouses the view that chlorofluorocarbons are the cause of any warming trends, and the ones who dabble in known pseudoscience, to the one who attacks evolution, drawing frequent connections between evolution and Nazism, these so-called scientists are fringe, to say the least. In fact, Greenpeace research director Kert Davies — an expert on following the money of the fossil fuel industry to paid global warming skeptics — says that of the scientists listed in the ad, 29 of them show up in his database as discredited, perennial naysayers.

Michaels has pushed Cato to interpret libertarianism as inclusive of crackpot science. This I said in a letter to Ed Crane, founder and president of Cato.

It’s no wonder some of us have gotten sick of Earth Day.

So I found a way to deal. Earth Day is the day I litter. Throw the McDonald’s wrappers right out the window. Take unnecessary trips in my car, leave lights on, pretend that nuclear power is safe and that the waste magically goes away, that coal is clean and the tops of mountains are not blown off to mine it. I let the water run while I shave — ahhh, that stream of pure, hot water … endless.