Climate Politics

Democrats are undermining the strongest message behind climate policy

In this post, I argued that the best, simplest, and most impactful message for advocates of climate legislation is this: Good climate policy will rescue American families from a sinking ship. I meant to add that the Dems not only seem to miss the power of this message, but are by all appearances working to […]

Oklahoma senator makes stuff up, wastes time in climate change debate

James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Senate’s leading climate change denier, had plenty of kooky and alarmist things to say in yesterday’s debate over climate change legislation. Think Progress has video of one of his wing-nuttiest contributions to the discussion, in which he lies about Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, and the IPCC: Yep, the same IPCC […]

It’s official:

Green is not the new black.

Climate bills will only get better from here

Mark Thoma, whose Economist’s View is an excellent resource for all things economic, posts a roundup of writing on cap-and-trade versus a carbon tax, including a good primer on how the economics work and why the two plans are so similar. He also excerpts a rather cynical take by Pete Davis on the political reasons […]

Global warming draws heat from Dems

Here's an article out today from Roll Call ($ub. req'd), which has been covering Congress since 1955:

Obama claims nomination, but Clinton says she’s not going anywhere yet

Photo: wfiupublicradio Barack Obama secured enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, passing the threshold of 2,118 needed to become the party’s candidate. “Because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with […]

Senate begins debate on Lieberman-Warner climate bill — sort of

After last night’s cloture vote, Senate Republicans asked for 30 hours before legislatively productive debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act could begin. That means they spent all of today kibitzing about climate legislation without any progress toward amending or voting. Joe Romm has been live-blogging all day over on Climate Progress, and I’ve also […]

Conservative Christian group outraged that Congress is distracted by climate change

In today’s daily action alert from the Family Research Council, President Tony Perkins bemoans the fact that the Senate is wasting time talking about climate change when the gays are still running around getting married willy-nilly: Now, fresh off a holiday weekend in which most families paid $4 a gallon to drive to neighborhood barbecues, […]

GOP circulating at least 90 weakening amendments to Climate Security Act

Senate Republicans are already circulating at least 90 amendments that would weaken the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Here’s a complete list of those we know about already, including measures that would add nuclear subsidies, lower emissions targets, and introduce a safety valve. And fight is only just beginning …

Climate bills would save world’s forests

• More money for forests and wildlife conservation than has ever been available in history
• The regrowth of many of the world's forests
• Massive quantities of greenhouse gases sucked out of the air

Those are a few of the benefits of the newest versions of the climate legislation now being considered in the House and Senate. Both the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill [PDF] and Rep. Ed Markey's latest proposal [PDF] include massive financing for forest and land conservation that could save these planetary lungs.

Both bills are based on a fundamental recognition that trees suck up vast quantities of carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen -- and that standing pristine forests and grasslands (especially tropical forests) are a tremendous storehouse of carbon that we've got to keep safely locked up in forests. Indeed, deforestation for agriculture and logging is already driving 20 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions and is the biggest single source in the developing world.

And so these bills would unleash unprecedented levels of financing to preserve great natural reserves from Big Ag, Big Timber, and land-hungry peasants.

But the ways in which they do it -- and the overall scope of the bills -- could spell very different fates for the forests and grasslands they're meant to save. The Lieberman-Warner bill would allow polluters to offset their own pollution with more than 25 percent offsets through domestic and international forest, grassland, and agricultural conservation, reforestation, and afforestation -- amounting to billions of dollars a year in financing opportunities. Polluters are likely to jump at these forestry offset opportunities: Because of the relatively low price of land and the immense quantities of carbon stored in the forests, conserving forests is generally a lot cheaper than cleaning up industrial pollution.

The Markey bill takes a different approach. In the past, there's been some skepticism that offsets from forestry could be accurately tracked. In the words of a senior adviser to Markey's global warming committee, "You can't plug a meter into a tree to see how much carbon was sucked in that day." There were also concerns in the past that it would be hard to accurately track whether a forest that was "saved" would actually have been cut down in the absence of financing or conservation action.