Delay of game

Four Democratic senators call for delay on climate legislation 12

Four moderate Democratic senators—all considered swing votes on climate legislation—want a climate bill put off until next year. They say Congress should focus on passing health-care legislation.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) told Bloomberg.

Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) are also calling for a delay on climate action. While they are amenable to moving ahead with the energy bill that passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June, they are less enthusiastic about passing a bill that would cap carbon dioxide emissions.

“We should separate the energy bill from the climate bill,” said Conrad, adding that the energy portion “needs to be done as soon as we can get it done.”

“I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem,” said Lincoln.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) does not want to move the climate and energy legislation separately. He has said he plans to combine the energy bill with a cap-and-trade measure that would come from the Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of that committee, has said she will introduce her climate bill after the August recess and have it approved by her committee by Sept. 28, the deadline Reid set for committee work on a climate bill.

“I don’t think we are going to take to the Senate floor a bill stripped of climate provisions,” Reid said at an energy summit in Las Vegas last week.

But chances for Senate action on climate this fall are growing dimmer. The health-care debate was pushed off until after Labor Day, when Congress returns from its August recess, and it’s expected to consume much of September and October. Many senators who are playing key roles with health-care legislation are also important to the climate debate, including Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who has said his committee should write the portion of a climate bill that allocates pollution permits. It’s highly unlikely his committee would start work on that until after its work on health care is completed.

Kate Sheppard is Grist’s political reporter.

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  1. greenpeacetempe Posted 1:12 pm
    14 Aug 2009

    Ouch.Delayers are almost as bad as deniers.

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    1. randino Posted 7:18 am
      15 Aug 2009

      No almost about it.  The delayers are the deniers.Randy Cunningham

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  2. josullivan58 Posted 1:27 pm
    14 Aug 2009

    Maybe the focus should be on using the Clean Air Act to spur congress to act.

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  3. Jason D Scorse's avatar

    Jason D Scorse Posted 2:32 pm
    14 Aug 2009

    And these are the same fools trying to delay healthcare!!! Uhhhhhhh

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    1. veritone Posted 2:37 am
      15 Aug 2009

      I used to have some admiration for Conrad, but now he's beneath my contempt. Not only is he clubbing in with delaying this bill, but he's the leading champion for the brain dead healthcare coop idea. The health insurance industry and big pharma know that coops can never scale to threaten their market dominance in the way a government run plan would. It's the psuedo public option. And of course the healthcare industry has been helping themselves by inspiring near fascist performances from the terminally stupid, emotionally supercharged morons that this nation appears to have a large supply of. It is hard to watch this colossal tragedy play out on the national stage. It must be opposed with every fibre of our being, those of us who have a brain and backbone. If healthcare fails, effective climate energy legislation will fail also. And this dreadful outcome would be please our corporate masters no end.

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  4. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 5:25 pm
    14 Aug 2009

    Copy cats! Signed,Delay and Deny  

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  5. veritone Posted 2:40 am
    15 Aug 2009

    I recall Krugman making a very interesting observation in one of his articles. 16% of the population elects half our Senators. Consider how much population the aforementioned four Senators represent. I would abolish the Senate in a heartbeat if it were up to me.

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    1. randino Posted 7:28 am
      15 Aug 2009

      You are getting warm, Veritone, about where the fault lies.  The fact is that our system of government is designed to be dysfunctional.  Stalemate, gridlock and inertia are not accidents.  They are not aberrations.  They were the intent of our sainted founding fathers, and were designed to protect the "rights" of slave owners and aristocrats.  It is not about the morons at the health care town halls, nefarious Republicans, and duplicitous Democrats.  It is - unfortunately - about much, much more. A system of government that worked sort of OK for over 200 years, is the greatest threat this country and this planet face for their futures.  Asking the current governing arrangement to address an issue like climate change, is like asking a porpoise to knit you a sweater.It is time to call the United States for what it is.  A failed state.Randy Cunningham 

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  6. newnoah Posted 11:15 am
    15 Aug 2009

    Isn't Waxman-Markey confirmation that "Climate policy is characterized by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points."
    David Spratt, Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, Australia, Published July, 2008

    "These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the realities of politics as usual and business as usual. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model."
    http://www.civicus.org/new/media/climatecodered_1.pdf

    Isn't Waxman-Markey one more hard to ignore lesson that those committed to climate change solution need to solve the broken / captured government problem first: How to get out of BAU where needed change isn't possible? Instead of just mis-educating the public and helping the delayers?

    "...(T)he critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it." Ken Ward
    http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-u.s.-groups-desert-precaution/

    bill  (at) pacificfringe.net

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  7. newnoah Posted 11:18 am
    15 Aug 2009

    Isn't Waxman-Markey confirmation that "Climate policy is characterized by the habituation of low expectations and a culture of failure. There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points."
    David Spratt, Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, Australia, Published July, 2008

    "These scientific imperatives are incompatible with the realities of politics as usual and business as usual. Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model."
    http://www.civicus.org/new/media/climatecodered_1.pdf

    Isn't Waxman-Markey one more hard to ignore lesson that those committed to climate change solution need to solve the broken / captured government problem first: How to get out of BAU where needed change isn't possible? Instead of just mis-educating the public and helping the delayers?

    "...(T)he critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it." Ken Ward
    http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-u.s.-groups-desert-precaution/

    bill  (at) pacificfringe.net

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  8. neosapiens Posted 9:48 am
    17 Aug 2009

    If delayers are trying to kill climate action by loading up the bill and making it so complicated that it can't be considered, an alternative might be to push through an eminently simple carbon tax?  A very simple bill could be pushed through despite the other complicated business going on in Congress. And it would light a fire under the competing interests that have held the Waxman-Markey bill captive. 

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  9. Anna Haynes's avatar

    Anna Haynes Posted 9:41 am
    18 Aug 2009

    NewNoah's link for the "abrupt political change" Ken Ward quote is dead - the new URL is
    http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-u.s.-groups-desert-precaution/

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