A top White House adviser yesterday pushed back against the idea of paring down Senate legislation on energy and global warming and frowned upon emerging talk among some moderates to limit legislative efforts to capping greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

“Our position is, let’s do it all,” said Carol Browner, President Obama’s senior aide on climate and energy issues. “Slicing and dicing isn’t going to work. It’s time to finally have comprehensive energy legislation in this country.”

That’s Greenwire (subs. req’d) reporting today on a panel discussion that included Browner.  She still has her (globally) warm sense of humor:

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) earlier this week confirmed he plans to bring up the energy and climate bill on the floor next spring after work is done on both health care and financial regulatory reform. Asked about that timing, Browner said she expects to see Senate action in March or April. “The good news is spring comes early in Washington, earlier and earlier with climate change,” she joked.

I’ve been traveling, so I haven’t had time to dive into the idea floated by some, including Sen. Lugar’s office, of “combining power plant-only cap-and-trade legislation with building efficiency standards and stronger fuel efficiency requirements for the transportation sector.”  I doubt that will be the endgame, since the more one looks into the idea, the less sense it makes.

After all, Obama already announced he will raise new car fuel efficiency standards to 35.5 mpg by 2015, and I find it hard to believe Lugar or any of those who oppose an economy-wide cap are prepared to go significantly farther than that.  Strong building efficiency standards are great — that’s why Waxman and Markey put them in the House’s bipartisan climate and clean energy bill (see “Better buildings soon? Energy and climate bill would set national energy codes“).  They belong in any comprehensive legislation.  Funny how they aren’t in the Senate Energy Committee’s bill, though….

A power-plant only cap-and-trade is, of course, what George Bush campaigned on in 2000 and then abandoned shortly after taking office under the influence of Dick Cheney.  I think it loses more votes than it gets because right now the compromise involves everybody, and that’s a key reason the utility industry supported the House bill and continues to support action in the Senate.  If the entire burden of emissions reductions were placed on that one sector, I think many utilities will jump ship, and that undermines the whole political deal.

But Browner argued that U.S. industries would prefer a combined effort all at once.

“If you only get a little piece of the problem, if we deal with some of our production issues, breaking our dependence on foreign oil, or if we do only a renewable electricity standard, then you’re not going to give industry the predictability and certainty they need to start making the large capital investments they’re eager to make,” Browner said.

Browner, a former EPA administrator during the Clinton administration, said she has been a regular visitor on Capitol Hill to meet with Senate Democrats and Republicans on the legislation. Based on those conversations, she said she has reason to think a final bill can overcome a threatened Senate filibuster and make it to Obama’s desk despite the looming midterm elections next November.

“What we’re seeing is, the conversation is not, ‘Well, if there is a bill,’” she said. “The conversation has become, ‘Well, a bill will have to do these things.’ Now that doesn’t mean you automatically get to 60. Sixty is always a tough number. But I, having worked on the Hill [as an aide to then Sen. Al Gore], having helped to pass legislation, having done so when I was at EPA, it’s a different tone. And I think that is cause for optimism. It won’t be easy. But I think there’s a pathway. I think there is a way to put together the components of what we want and meet the needs of enough senators to get a 60-vote margin.”

I remain optimistic that an economy wide bill will become law next year, as do folks who have far more Hill experience, including my colleague at CAP:

“There is a myth in Washington, perpetrated by politicians and journalists, that in an election year you don’t pass any kind of legislation,” said former Rep. Phil Sharp (D-Ind.), now the head of the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future. “The history is the opposite. I defy you to find a major piece of complex environmental legislation that did not pass except near the very tail-end of the session.”

Sharp cited the 1990 Clean Air Act and energy bills enacted during the Carter administration. “All of them came literally in the last hours of the session almost,” Sharp added. “I think that’s a myth we should just get rid of right now.”

Dan Weiss, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, questioned why so many are quick to rule out the bill’s passage in 2010.

“The obituary for this bill is going to be written repeatedly between now and when the president signs it next year,” Weiss said. “More time is always better than less time. But if you look at other pieces of complex legislation. We’re far ahead of where they were.”

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Feeling ambivalent?Will the Waxman-Markey bill spark a full-scale energy revolution?

No. Not on its own, not in the next 10-15 years. The short-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases are too low, the renewable electricity standard is too weak, too many offsets are allowed, and there's too little investment in clean energy. To boot, there's every indication the bill will get worse before it passes ... in the unlikely event it passes.

The green world is grappling with these unpleasant facts right now, fluctuating between rage (kill it!), dread (we're screwed), and resignation (it's better than nothing). Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, on odd-numbered days, I think I've reached a fragile zen detente with the whole process. Mainly, I've been trying to focus on a different question: will there be an energy revolution? After all, the American Clean Energy and Security Act is not the only shot for Obama to make good on his campaign promises on energy. Nor is the legislation our last chance to tackle the climate crisis. No bill can carry that kind of weight, not at this moment, with this Congress. America is at the tail end of an era of cheap energy and heedless economic growth. Waxman-Markey is just the struggle to get an extremely hidebound, backward-looking set of political institutions to acknowledge that the old order is collapsing. Building a new order is something else entirely.

The question is, what's going to happen after the bill is passed? An energy revolution will require a combination of social, technological, business, legal, regulatory, and legislative changes. Federal legislation can't do all the lifting. Conversely, other changes can compensate somewhat for a weak (at least at the outset) federal framework. What will ultimately make the difference is not the specific mechanics of the bill but the, ahem, Sweep of History. (And who better to capture the Sweep of History than Some Blogger?)

I am reasonably optimistic, despite the flaws in Waxman-Markey, that history is on our side, and that the arguments happening today in Congress will soon be seen as peculiar and archaic. Here, briefly, is why:

Obama (Lo, is he not The Beginning of All Lists?)

There is no reason to think that this bill is going to be Obama's only legacy on energy. Already there's been the stimulus bill, which will probably do more for clean energy in the next five years than Waxman-Markey, the new mileage standards, and the big climate impacts report. And there is plenty more to come.

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell has a fantastic piece on Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (For reasons only RS understands, it is not yet online. However, Charlie Petit at Knight has a bootleg PDF copy and some thoughts on the piece. Also read Brad Plumer. And while you're at it, read Brad's long and extremely excellent piece on the question of whether we need technological breakthroughs to beat climate change, which is centered on Chu.)

The RS piece contains this striking passage:

"The fact is, we're not going to level out at 450 ppm," [Chu] says. "We're going to go over 450 ppm. So what will we do? I'm not in favor of deploying geoengineering. But thinking about it is OK."

For a moment, the room goes quiet. In effect, the United States secretary of energy has just told an elite group of scientists and politicians that, no matter what happens with climate legislation this summer in Congress, no matter what China does or does not do, no matter what targets are set at climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, our future as a species is likely a grim one. Chu has uttered the politically unthinkable: that his own administration's efforts to halt global warming might not be enough to avert a catastrophe.

In other words, Chu gets it. He knows that this isn't just political football. It isn't just another "issue." It's imminent misery, not just for future generations but for people alive today.

And he's not the only one. White House science adviser John Holdren gets it. So do climate czar Carol Browner, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, CEQ chief Nancy Sutley, and both Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern at State. So, if we're to believe those close to him, does Barack Obama (though many of his supporters are beginning to have their doubts, what with his ongoing low profile on the subject).

If Obama wins a second term, we will have eight years of an administration filled with people who believe that the fate of millions, possibly human civilization itself, rests on their ability to tackle this problem. They're not going to view the passage of a compromised cap-and-trade bill as the end of their responsibility. They'll use their eight years to make sure the long-term emission-reduction framework put in place by Waxman-Markey is part of our national DNA. They'll keep pushing China. They'll use executive branch tools (including, but not only, the EPA). They'll drive research and deployment.

In eight years, the quest for a clean energy revolution will not be a subject for partisan dispute but a simple fact, a shared national mission, and part of every business's long-term planning.

Some other reasons for hope:

• Oil prices threaten the economic recovery, as Ryan Avent keeps warning. Coal is getting more expensive, and several coal utilities are applying for rate increases. Gas prices are going to fluctuate (generally on the way up).

In short, fossil fuels are not going to become less of an economic pain in the ass. Their corrosive effects on the economy and public health seem likely to become steadily more apparent. Once consumers are familiar with alternative sources that offer stable, effectively free (after the initial capital investment) power, they're going to start demanding them.

• Cleantech is cool. This is from Joshua Green's excellent piece on clean energy in The Atlantic:

Shortly after the inauguration, a friend up for several jobs in the new administration confessed that he yearned to wind up at the Department of Energy. "It's like NASA in the '60s," he told me. "All the best and brightest want to be there." Obama's choice of Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate physicist, as secretary of energy only heightened the allure. In the early Obama era, romantic notions about making one's mark on history tend to take the form of helping recast America's economy, and by extension the world's, in a way that will head off global catastrophe.

And this:

"Think of the smartest guy you've ever met and then imagine 50,000 more just like him innovating all at once," Mike Danaher, a partner and cleantech specialist at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. "Just as they did with telecom in the '90s, they're attacking every component of every kind of alternative energy to improve it."

Cleantech's allure can partly be captured via numbers -- the amount of VC investment, the amount of stimulus money -- but it goes beyond that. It's about nerd chic. Figuring out energy is what all the hot-shit brainiacs coming out of Ivy League schools want to do these days. There's just an amazing amount of brainpower being devoted to these problems, more every day. I predict the pace of innovation is going to outstrip even the most optimistic projections. The clean-energy mammals will overwhelm the dirty-energy dinosaurs sooner than we think.

• The need for a real economy. One thing you frequently hear about the bubble-busts of the last 20 years is that there was too much capital chasing too few real investments. We need a new source of economic growth to absorb that capital. And there's a felt need today for Americans to start making stuff again -- inventing, manufacturing, and exporting things of real value.

What can we make? What's the new source of growth? Here's how economist James K. Galbraith put it:

Finally, there is the big problem: ... How to build the productive economy for the next generation? ...

Today the largest problems we face are energy security and climate change—massive issues because energy underpins everything we do, and because climate change threatens the survival of civilization. And here, obviously, we need a comprehensive national effort. Such a thing, if done right, combining planning and markets, could add 5 or even 10 percent of GDP to net investment. That’s not the scale of wartime mobilization. But it probably could return the country to full employment and keep it there, for years.

Moreover, the work does resemble wartime mobilization in important financial respects. Weatherization, conservation, mass transit, renewable power, and the smart grid are public investments. As with the armaments in World War II, work on them would generate incomes not matched by the new production of consumer goods. If handled carefully—say, with a new program of deferred claims to future purchasing power like war bonds—the incomes earned by dealing with oil security and climate change have the potential to become a foundation of restored financial wealth for the middle class.

This basic view, albeit toned down, is mirrored in Joe Biden's Middle Class Task Force, which is pushing hard on clean energy as a source of restored middle class prosperity.

All of which is to say: the structural position of the U.S. economy more or less requires a push toward clean energy. You can't build an economy on moving fake money around forever. If you want large and expanding markets, there aren't that many places to go.

• States and cities won't stop. Waxman-Markey may set national standards at relatively weak levels, but plenty of states have tougher renewable electricity standards. A few are experimenting with feed-in tariffs (see here and here) and producing extraordinary results. You can't throw a rock without hitting a mayor who wants to revitalize his or her city by establishing a reputation as green (see Grist's list of 15 green mayors).

The federal debate is warped by the outsized influence of carbon-intensive states and industries (magnified both by corporate contributions and by the frakked-up structure of U.S. constitutional government). But at the subnational level, there is a swarm of political leaders without the same constraints. Eventually, their success -- not only environmental success but subsequent economic and political success -- will alter the political calculus even in the most recalcitrant states. Whether or not the trend is accelerated by Waxman-Markey, wealth is already transferring from middle states to the coasts, because the East and West coasts are where the action and innovation are.

• We are on the cusp of an extended progressive era. This is the one I'm least confident about, so I'm putting it last. But in my optimistic moments, I agree with the politics editor at The Nation, Chris Hayes:

Look at how far we've come in the last four years. We have a black president who ran on the most ambitiously progressive domestic agenda in a generation. Look at the political perspectives of the youngest voters, the most progressive cohort since the dawn of polling on almost every issue. White, male, Christians are the demographic roadblock. And the country is getting less white and less Christian. The macro forces are moving in our direction. What makes you lose hope is the hand-to-hand combat happening on Capitol Hill. Progressives have a unique lack of self-confidence where we feel like we are just going to get this one little chance, but I think the force of history is on our side. I believe that with every last fiber of my being.

I can't say I believe that with my every fiber. Maybe 60 to 70 percent of my fibers. But sometimes, when I squint just right, I see a future blooming with cultural and technological ferment, a tidal change on the way that will be helped by a strong federal climate bill but will not be stopped by a weak one.

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UPDATED: 16 Sep 2009

President Barack Obama's key advisers on energy and climate issues include a former top aide to Al Gore, a Nobel Prize winner, a governor, and a gaggle of former members of Congress. Here's a rundown:

Carol Browner
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change

Browner serves as a special adviser to the White House on climate and energy, a new role Obama created to work on an issue he has defined as one of his top concerns. Browner has been keeping a low profile in Washington, offering very few on-the-record interviews and not receiving as much of the limelight as other administration players, though it's clear her role in coordinating policy within the administration is major. She's at the table during economic discussions, and was the key negotiator hashing out a new deal on automobile emissions.

Browner served as Florida's secretary of the environment from 1991 to 1993, and was a top aide to Al Gore when he was in the Senate. She served as EPA administrator during the entire Clinton administration, and later served as a principal in The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm lead by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as Albright Capital Management.

Photo: epa.govLisa Jackson
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency | epa.gov

During her first months on the job, Lisa Jackson has made significant headway on several climate issues that the Bush administration EPA refused to take up. Within days of taking office, Jackson announced that the agency was beginning the process of reevaluating whether California and other states should be able to set their own higher standards for automobile emissions; the administration has now adopted those standards nationwide. She also moved the agency forward on regulating planet-warming emissions by declaring that they do, in fact, pose a threat to public health and welfare.

Jackson has been adamant that the EPA will move forward on regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act if Congress doesn't pass a climate bill this year, telling reporters, "The race is clearly on." But she has also maintained that the administration would prefer new legislation, and has encouraged Congress to deliver it.

Jackson came to the Obama administration from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which she lead from February 2006 to November 2008. Enviros in the state gave her mixed reviews, though national green leaders cheered her appointment to the post.

Watch a video interview with Jackson by Grist's Amanda Little.

Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy | energy.gov

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist who came to the administration from a post at the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has made some ambitious moves in his first months in office. Greens swooned when he called coal his "worst nightmare," but he hasn't been quite as much of a rabble-rouser in office.

Among his biggest accomplishments so far have been streamlining the loan guarantee process at DOE and initiating new partnerships with other departments to improve energy efficiency. He also scored a win in securing funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

Photo: BikePortland.orgRay LaHood
Secretary of Transportation | dot.gov

Ray LaHood was a Republican congressman from Illinois up until his retirement in 2008, making his pick a surprising one. He has not been a particularly visible member of the administration in its first months, though his department has made some major headway on key environmental issues.

The Department of Transportation scored $8 billion in funding for Amtrak in the stimulus package, as well as $15 billion in the budget to create a "world-class passenger rail system" across the country. Everyone's favorite climate curmudgeon, George Will, has basically written LaHood off as a communist for supporting mass transit.

DOT also played a central role in reaching a new deal on automobile emissions, one of the first major actions the administration has taken to curb global warming. And LaHood appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in support of the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill in April.

Photo: Mike DisharoonKen Salazar
Secretary of Interior | interior.gov

The former Colorado senator got mixed reviews from enviros when he was nominated, and he's still getting them. He got cheers for withdrawing oil-shale leases on tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. He also got a gold star for scrapping the Bush administration's offshore leasing plan. But he has not written off offshore drilling entirely and is reportedly at work on a new offshore-drilling plan.

Salazar got a thumbs-down from enviros for upholding the Bush administration's policy on polar bears. The bears will continue to be considered a threatened species, since climate change is melting their Arctic habitat, but they won't get the protections from oil and gas exploration that a declaration as "endangered" would give them.

Photo: change.govNancy Sutley
Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality | CEQ site

Nancy Sutley came to the Obama administration from the Los Angeles mayor's office. She has promised to be the "voice for the environment" within the White House, and said she "will play an important role in coordinating the efforts of the federal government" on environmental policy, but her work is largely behind the scenes.

She has pledged that Obama and his administration are willing to stake their political capital on passing a climate bill.

Watch a video interview with Sutley by Grist's Amanda Little.

Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Agriculture | usda.gov

Obama's decision to appoint the former Iowa governor to head the Agriculture Department was blasted by some in the green movement who believe Vilsack is beholden to the industrial agriculture interests that are deeply rooted in his home state. So far, however, the ag secretary has avoided significant controversy, though USDA is working to influence how climate legislation governs farmers and the ethanol industry.

Vilsack has said he believes farm and forestry operations should earn carbon credits under a national climate program (a view in synch with Big Ag), with his department providing the necessary oversight. Then there's the question of how EPA will measure biofuels' impact on offsetting carbon dioxide emissions -- a complicated issue that promises to leave either farmers or EPA scientists angry in the end.

Photo: dol.govHilda Solis
Secretary of Labor | dol.gov

Hilda Solis, Obama's green-jobs-loving labor secretary, has been a low-key figure thus far, though she has spoken publicly about the administration's desire to create millions of jobs in the renewable-energy and energy-efficiency sectors. Before joining the administration, she represented California's 32nd Distract in the House and was a key player in getting the Green Jobs Act passed in 2007.

The Labor Department recently announced that it is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend funds from the economic recovery act to train and employ residents of public housing in green jobs.

Get involved in the fight against climate change via Grist's Climate Citizens project.

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Planet Forward host Frank Sesno (right) with Kevin Harrison of the National Renewable Energy Lab.Courtesy of PBSThree things to know about Planet Forward, the PBS special about America’s energy future that runs at 8 p.m. Wednesday:

(He responds by talking about cutting air pollutants and eventually carbon dioxide emissions, and about using coal power to lift people out of poverty, but not about the damages of mountaintop-removal mining.)

The project attracted some impressive testimonies. Sherry Boschert, who drives a plug-in hybrid and lives beneath rooftop panels "in the foggy part" of San Francisco, tells Browner, "Carol, I haven’t bought gasoline for seven years and 70,000 miles. So our message is, this is not new technology. We can do it, we just need the political will to make it happen. I’m please that President Obama campaigned on the promise to put one million hybrids on the road by 2015. We now need to accelerate that process."

Even Connaughton, who mostly stuck to his role as apologist for clean coal and the Bush administration, had his moments.  On the potential of wind power, he says, "It’s not the technical challenges, but the political willingness to site these massive wind farms. There’s a lot of n-i-m-b-yism—not in my back yard—that is now ‘b-a-n-a-n-a-s’—build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything."

The show’s model would be worth continuing – Planet Forward was conceived as an ongoing series, though no plans beyond the one-time special have been nailed down, a spokeperson said. If the show finds a home and catches on, it could do quite a bit to raise the national level of debate on energy.

For now, the special airs Wednesday and planetforward.org features the videos included in the debut, plus dozens more. Here’s one of the more entertaining, with original music, no less:

Watch Wednesday’s premier to see Carol Browner’s response.

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This post originally appeared at the Wonk Room.

Glenn Beck, the conservative ideologue whose show is mocked by fellow Fox News anchors, recently attacked plans to modernize our electric grid. After Carol Browner, President Obama's climate and energy adviser, said that a smart grid means "we can get to a system where an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won't operate at its peak, you'll still be able to cool your house, but that'll be a savings to the consumer," Beck argued that would lead to "one-world government" with "Czar Browner" in charge of everyone's air conditioners:

On Fox News, Beck snorted, "Gosh, that would be great if I could just keep turning the air conditioner up and the government won't let me do it. That's fantastic." Watch it:

In reality, Browner was describing demand-side management technology, the kind of grid modernization that corporate executives from Wal-Mart's Lee Scott to American Electric Power's Mike Morris have called an essential advance. Our antiquated power grid, a national embarassment which threatens our energy future, needs to be upgraded to a digital network just as the analog phone system gave way to the Internet.

Beck's rant assumes that an "electric company" and "the government" are one and the same. In fact, eight-four percent of the United States retail electric power market is provided by private companies. Over 120 million customers are served by the private market, versus 21 million served by public utilities, most of which are small municipal entities. The concept that Carol Browner would have control over a national thermostat is frankly bizarre:

During his diatribes on his Fox News show and his radio program, Beck also called cap-and-trade — which would establish a multi-billion-dollar private market in pollution allowances — "one of my favorite socialist ideas." Although global warming is increasing the deadly heat waves that worry him so, Beck further claimed "the only thing that has become incredibly clear on the science of climate change is that they can't decide whether to call it global warming or call it climate change."

It's not surprising that someone who can't tell the difference between capitalism and socialism doesn't understand much about science either.

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