A few moderate senators in both parties hold in their hands the fate of climate legislation — and hence the possibility that the nation and the world might have a realistic chance of averting catastrophic climate impacts. That’s because
- The GOP has made the fateful — and fatal — decision to cast its lot with dirty energy and anti-scientific denial (see “Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh“).
- The overwhelming majority of Democrats are, like Tom Perriello (D-VA), willing to do the right thing even if it has little or no short-term political benefit and possibly a real political cost for them (see Perriello: “The Republicans may win some seats because of this vote, but they can’t regain their souls for demagoguing the issue.”)
Readers have asked for a discussion of the key swing senators. I will begin a multipart series on that by examining a fascinating statistical analysis of who “Who Voted for the Climate Bill [in the House]? (And Why?)” by the stat master Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. Silver “built a logistic regression model that attempted to predict the likelihood of a particular congressman voting for the cap-and-trade bill as the result of a variety of factors.”
Ultimately, he found a “pretty useful” set of variables that “explains about three-quarters (R-squared = .74) of a particular Congressman’s vote on the climate bill. The model predicted 401 of 431 votes correctly.” Here are the factors affecting votes “listed roughly in declining order of significance”:
Ideology. The overall liberal-conservative bent of a Representative, as determined by DW-NOMINATE scores, which run from -1 for very liberal to +1 for very conservative. In this instance, I use the “common space” version of DW-NOMINATE scores, which are slightly less robust overall but place Representatives and Senators on a level playing field, which will come in handy later when we try and predict (as we will in a subsequent post) how the Senate will vote on the bill. Scores are as of the 110th Congress; for freshman Congressmen, they are extrapolated from Progressive Punch scores.
District Partisan Lean. The PVI (Partisan Voting Index) in a district was a highly significant variable; Congressman in Democratic-leaning districts were more likely to vote for Waxman-Market and those in Republican ones more likely to vote against it, all else being equal.
Lobbying Money. As in the case of health care, funds raised from certain types of PACs are a significant predictor of a representative’s vote, although the money in this case cuts both ways. Whereas receiving contributions from coal industry PACs decreased the likelihood of a vote for Waxman-Markey, contributions from nuclear and alternative energy providers significantly increased it. I also looked at contributions from oil and gas industry PACs, public utility PACs, and agribusiness PACs, but these had no statistically significant effects. All data is taken from the Center for Responsive Politics and covers the 2004 cycle forward; contributions are divided by the number of cycles a Representative has participated in as a Congressman or as a candidate.
Carbon Emissions. I use county-by-county data on the amount of carbon emissions per capita in a particular area, as determined by Project Vulcan. This requires us to map the county data onto congressional districts by dividing the population of a county evenly among all congressional districts that occupy a part of its geography. Estimates are in metric tons of carbon consumed annually per capita. The carbony-ist district is the At-Large one in Wyoming, which produces 36.3 metric tons of carbon per capita; the least carbon-intensive are the 10th and 11th Congressional Districts of New York, which are both located in Brooklyn and are responsible for 1.1 metric tons of carbon per capita.
Poverty Rate. Although the Waxman-Markey bill contains provisions to refund a portion of increased energy costs to lower-income consumers, it was nevertheless more likely to receive support in districts where the poverty rate is low. Alternate measures of economic welfare like per-capita income work almost as well in the model and could serve as reasonable substitutes for the poverty rate.
Employment in Carbon-Intensive Industries. Lastly, the fraction of a district’s jobs that are in manufacturing, mining or agriculture was a good predictor of voting on Waxman-Markey (although this variable was significant only at the 90 percent level and not at the 95 percent level).
Yes, Silver is a smart guy with a lot of time on his hands! Further evidence of that fact is that he is in Vegas for the World Series of Poker — and yes, I am jealous! But I digress.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this analysis is the Members “the model thinks were most likely to vote for Waxman-Markey but in fact didn’t,” the Members with a high Probability of a Yes Vote — Pr(Y) — who voted “nay”:
Silver notes:
The first three names on this list — Pete Stark, Dennis Kucinch, and Peter DeFazio, apparently all cast nay votes on the bill because they they thought it was too conservative. One imagines that they might have voted for the bill nevertheless if their votes were necessary to secure passage — but as it actually went down, they didn’t.
I am not a big fan of these “no” voters. This was not the time for symbolic protest votes. It was the time for running up a sizable victory to send a message to the Senate. Indeed, I’m sure that Pelosi and the House whips let a number of vulnerable members vote no because they weren’t needed. While understandable tactically, I think that was strategically unwise.
You can also check out Silver’s list of those who voted yes, even though their Pr(Y) were well below 50% — McHugh (R-NY), Hill (D-IN), Space (D-OH), Teague (D-NM), Reichert (R-WA), Lance (R-NJ), Peterson (D-MN!), Castle (R-DE), Skelton (D-MO), and Bono Mack (R-CA). Some people, especially moderate Republicans, are willing to break with their ideologically rigid party leadership and do the right thing. Big kudos to all these Members.
Silver’s “general takeaways”:
- People on the whole were pretty rational in trying to balance “selfish” traits (their own ideology; lobbying influences) against “unselfish” ones (the economic and political characteristics of their districts).
- Nevertheless, the playing field is fairly broad, as there are quite a few representatives for whom these traits balance out in ambiguous ways. Some 95 representatives — about 20 percent of the House — were deemed to have between a 10 percent and a 90 percent chance of voting for the bill and can reasonably be described as swing votes.
- Cap-and-trade differs from health care in that there are particular private sector groups that would appear to benefit from its passage: nuclear power and renewable energy providers. Although the nuclear energy lobby is small, and the alternative energy industry lobby is very small, they nevertheless appear to have had some influence; nuclear is a big, untold part of this story. On the other hand, the effects of the agricultural lobby appear to have been mostly neutralized, perhaps because of concessions made in the bill to farm-state Democrats.
- This bill faces long, but not impossible, odds in the Senate
I’m not certain how “nuclear is a big, untold part of this story,” since the bill doesn’t have any direct goodies for the industry, although obviously any carbon price helps low carbon energy sources. I do expect that nuclear will be a big, well-told part of the story in the Senate.
I’m not certain the bill faces “long” odds in the Senate. I’d put it at better than 50-50, actually — it is entirely in the hands of President Obama, I think. But it won’t be the same bill.
Silver has applied his analysis to the Senate side, which I will discuss in part 2.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Good post but please change 538.com, an advertising site, to fivethirtyeight.com, an insightful political site.
Thanks for the great work.
From an article in the Guardian UK:
“Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 ppm before the industrial revolution to around 387ppm today. Environmentalists say that any new global deal on climate must restrict the growth of CO2 levels to 450ppm, though more pessimistic scientists say that the world is heading for 550ppm or even 650ppm.
‘When we get up to and above 450ppm, that really means we’re into the realms of catastrophic destruction of coral reefs and we’ll be moving into a planetary-wide global extinction,’ said Rogers.
“The only way to get to 350ppm or below is not only to have major cuts in CO2 emissions but also to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere through measures such as geo-engineering.”
Attenborough said the plight of the corals was another example of why the control of carbon was so important to the world’s inhabitants. ‘Each ecological disaster or problem traces its cause back to carbon. To quibble about this is really fiddling while Rome burns. If we do not control the emission of carbon, this world is heading for a major catastrophe and this is one of the first to be staring us straight in the face.’”
This would seem to lay out the facts plain enough, in light of which, this bit of news is terrible:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/major-nations-drop-goal-of-halving-c02-1737087.html
Gail, the Guardian article is correct in a vacuum, but in reality, there is no chance we can get to 350 anytime soon, absent what Joe Romm calls a climate “Pearl Harbor”. The bills in the US Congress, flawed as they are, lay an effective foundation for deeper action when the time is right, when the climate planes hit the island, as it were.
The perfect is the enemy of the good-enough-for-now in politics. There is no chance we can get the perfect anytime soon, and waiting could only inhibit chances later. We are getting the ball rolling.
“As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings with other international leaders, negotiators dropped a proposal that would have committed the world to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury and industrialized countries to slashing their emissions by 80 percent.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/world/europe/09prexy.html?ref=world
It seems that the best we can hope for is 50% decrease in world emissions (80% in the developed nations) by 2050, and even that will be very difficult. But we need an 80% to 90% decrease to keep CO2 levels down to 450 ppm (not to mention 350 ppm).
Nevertheless, I think there is still hope if the world agrees to a 50% decrease in Copenhagen. That agreement would cause such a large scale shift to alternative energy and conservation that it would bring prices down. With the lower prices and with the international framework in place, it would be possible to adopt a stronger goals in the 2010s and 2020s, when new scientific findings come in and show that the 50% decrease is far to little.
Frank C., I assure you I have been calling and writing my elected representatives to support W-M. I agree with our host that it’s the only game in town. But it is important to be practical about what actually needs to be accomplished. As far as I can tell, that is unfortunately totally reliant on as-yet-to-be-discovered technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean.
Gail,
Have you read the article in The Atlantic about geoengineering? What’s scary is that if we go above 450ppm and things get bad, countries or individuals could employ geoengineering schemes that could leave us in dire straits and even more damage can be done to the planet.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/climate-engineering
I hope the 350.org movement gets moving and people start to contact their senators about this issue. Most people I know don’t care at all about climate, which is very disturbing.
Nancy
Thank you for that link, Nancy. I had not seen the article before although I have read of scary geoengineering proposals. Blocking out the sun will might lower temperatures – and cause completely unpredictable outcomes as well – but it will not stop the acidification of the oceans which is a catastrophe in and of itself.
It is bizarre that so few people seem to care about climate. I think for many, it is just too frightening to confront.
I read Climateprogress almost every day, and admire you and agree with you on most issues, but I have to disagree with you not only ACES, but on criticizing DeFazio, Kucinich and Stark for voting no. This bill started mediocre and went downhill from there. The devilish details of starting points, offsets, etc. are bad enough, but to hobble the EPA and then to exempt agriculture, the single most important thing we have to change to avoid catastrophe, make this bill worse than doing nothing. As frightening as either prospect is, working and educating while waiting for reality to intrude on the fantasies of neocon morons and demagogues is the best we can do now.
The arguments I hear for the bill are absurd. ‘To give us “credibility” at summits’, is one example, as if half measures, vast concessions, near surrender and demonstrations of exactly how little say corporations and corporate-owned government will allow us child-like (in their view) tree huggers will do anything but destroy what little credibility the US could have had. After waking up from a terrible nightmare and beginning to put reality back in our lives we need to do better. Obama did almost nothing to help pass this: no education; no prime time address to the nation on a crisis more dire than any in history… we all know all this. I have come to be resigned to people being so depressed and despairing that they are unable and unwilling to ask for, demand and work for what we all need. But to criticize the few courageous and principled politicians who consistently stand up for what they believe is unacceptable.
We still must all work for stronger action, whether working, as I am, to get this bill voted down in the Senate (unless huge and unlikely improvements are made) or working for it in the hope that–I don’t know…What is it exactly you’re hoping will happen next? Will fairies appear and make it all OK with magic dust? Or will most people sit back believing the climate problem, which they don’t really understand to begin with, is taken care of while industry lawyers and lobbyists go to work weakening, avoiding and taking advantage of its mediocre provisions while institutionalizing its worst aspects and setting its limits (on EPA, for example) in concrete?
At the very least, understand and apologize to Kucinich, Stark and DeFazio, who you singled out for being better on your issues than you are.
[JR: No apology. They ain't bloggers. They have to make the real tough choices the rest of us don't. There is no plan B, as Gore said. If this bill dies, then with it dies any chance whatsoever of the nation and the world taking serious action on climate for a long time -- long enough to prove fatal to the necessary efforts to avert catastrophe.
This is NOT about getting credibility at summits -- I have never heard anybody say any such thing. This bill is about not crashing and burning the international process, not eliminating any chance whatsoever for a serious deal with China.
I have made crystal clear that this bill is a B- at best, but that it will begin the transformation of the US economy and ultimately lead to the elimination of the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gas emissions in four decades -- a staggering achievement.
The final vote made clear there is no majority for a stronger bill. I'd love to have seen Obama do more, but I seriously doubt he could have gotten a substantially stronger bill. The bill is not going to get stronger in the Senate, but if you are working to kill it then you are not working on behalf on climate progress. Sorry.
And for the record, pretty much every European country exempts agriculture and embraces offsets, so it's hard to see those as deal breakers.
What am I expecting would happen after this bill passes? We have a deal with China, an international deal, yet more aggressive clean energy programs from the administration, the bill starts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and particularly coal consumption, pushing more clean energy into the marketplace, the second term of the Obama administration has yet more aggressive clean energy programs -- and like most other environmental pieces of legislation, this bill gets tightened over time.
The question is what are YOU expecting after the U.S. political system shows it is incapable of doing even this much, after the deniers show they have they upper hand?]
]
JR—With all due respect, I believe I can disagree with you on tactics and still be working for climate change. I still have my membership card and key to prove it. And then there the emails I send out twice a week informing and (gently) haranguing everyone I know who will listen. Might I suggest not being so exclusive and certain that you insult and alienate people who are essentially on your side? You just grade on a curve.
[JR: If you are actively devoting a significant amount of your time and resources to killing this bill -- or plan to do so if it is not significantly strengthened -- then you are on the side of the conservatives and Breakthrough Institute. If you don't like the bill, I'd suggest focusing your efforts on state or local efforts aimed at climate action, rather than trying to stop those who are working to do what is possible at a national level.]
The deal with China is exactly what I assume people mean when they say ‘credibility in climate summits’ which I’ve read twice today alone. Not sure where but if I can find it again I’ll post it. The memory isn’t what it used to be, and it used to be mediocre. When China says ‘we’re the world’s leader in alternative energy’ and we say ‘well, we’re far richer than you, have produced far more GHG, aren’t so strong on solar, are destroying our own soil and forests all over the world (as they are, too, yes) and won’t let the EPA regulate pollution,’ what kind of deal can we drive them to? The way we will get such a deal without a moral stance shining like the city on the hill is by giving them concessions. Sort of like the EPA, offset and Ag concessions for ACES.
What I’d expect without a bill is exactly what I’d expect with one—more work, more education, more political action, and once Pearl Harbor happens, rapid action of the primed public. With this bill, once the Pearl Harbor event comes, Republicans can simply say ‘We’re on top of it. See, we already passed this dandy bill that takes care of everything. We don’t need to do any more.’
[JR: Uhh, no. If we have a bill passed and we have spent the years necessary to put in place regulations, oversight bodies, and the like -- then if we get multiple Pearl Harbors over a short period of time (one event won't do it) -- then we can strengthen the bill, which of coarse is precisely what happened with the Montréal protocol. Republicans can say whatever lies they want -- nobody is going to listen to them because they voted against the bill and will have been exposed as utterly wrong on the science. But if we don't have the bill and the framework in place "rapid action" is impossible. So I'm afraid your argument against the bill is in fact an argument for it.]
They can and will say that because I don’t think it’s the deniers who have the upper hand. They are, as polls show, a tiny percentage of the population. Yes, those of us who blog run into them everywhere, but I think that’s just a Random Denier-Argument Machine that spits out comments translated from various obscure languages onto many websites. That’s why there are so many that make so little sense. Congress is not stopped by deniers from doing more; it’s stopped by corporations who are given cover by (and give cover and money to) deniers; that gives cover to neocons, and they give cover to Democrats who can then be near-far right wing and still appear reasonable to most people.
I realize that because of all that there weren’t votes for a stronger bill now. That’s why I’m saying we have to wait, work, educate, vote people out of office, make this THE priority. What do you say to the hamstringing of the EPA? What do you say to Al Gore’s comment on soil carbon, intimately linked to organic matter in soil, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6658915.ece in the light of the Ag concession and the attacks (including Waxman’s other bill, 2749) on organic agriculture and homestead food production that will make it that much harder to turn land use around in the US and begin putting organic matter back into the soil?
I’m saying what I’ve been saying to deaf ears for years, that as long as progressives and people who understand the implications of climate catastrophe go meekly along with the Republican-Democrat consenses (?) on militarism, corporate hegemony and weak human rights protections there will be BAU. Only when progressives withdraw their consent from the Democratic party’s ever-increasing corporate rightism will we have a chance to change things. Will it work? I don’t know. I only know that what we’ve been doing isn’t working and hasn’t worked—for decades.
George Lakoff’s work is relevant here. Marie Louise von Franz’s Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology is, too. To change a people’s belief in a system it’s necessary to offer a strong opposition and a clear alternative. in addition to being ot enough in so-called ‘practical’ terms, ACES is too much of the same to do that. If we want to send messages to other countries maybe a series of good smaller bills would do it better than one bad omnibus. One on solar and wind, one on organics, etc. We could take tips from the Republicans. Name it right, make it seem unpatriotic to oppose it, bury the effective language details in the mountains of paper, say that because of the crisis there’s no time to read it, and then let it worm its way into the institutions it undermines. The Patriot Act I and II, No Child’s Behind Left, ‘Clear’ Skies, ‘Healthy’ Forests, Tort Deform, etc. can be our models.
J4zonian, I would share your general POV if it weren’t for the fact that the bill is not the only legislative/regulatory game in town and so fails to tie Obama’s hands in some important ways.
A key example of this is the Clean Water Act ocean acidification rulemaking process, which will allow the administration to go after carbon emitters with hot tongs regardless of any Clean Air Act provision.
Another example relates to the bilateral agreements that the administration is currently pursuing. What if, e.g., a technology development and sharing agreement were struck with the Chinese that committed them to an accelerated schedule of emission reductions based on the availability and roll-out (in both countries) of advanced alternative energy technologies? In principle, it seems to me that Congress would have a hard time saying no to such a thing, especially of it were extended to pick up India, the EU and Russia. (And yeah, there would be a side-benefit of enhanced credibility at summits, but what’s not to like?)
Of course neither of these guarantee anything about the future, and as Bush taught us a serious implementation of even something as limited as W-M requires a willing administration. With such an administration, much more is possible, noting that it’s extremely unlikely that Obama hired Chu, Holdren and Lubchenco just to piss them off to the point of quitting.
“if it was”
My kingdom for a grammar checker.
[JR: ???]
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?r=1&ISBN=9781596915213&ourl=What%2Dthe%2DHeck%2DAre%2DYou%2DUp%2DTo%2DMr%2DPresident%2FKevin%2DMattson
I’m looking forward to reading this book. Here’s an excerpt from a review:
Synopsis
In 1979, in an effort to right our national malaise, Jimmy Carter delivered a speech that risked his reputation and the future of the Democratic Party, changing the course of American politics for the next twenty-five years.
At a critical moment in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he gave a speech that should have changed the country. Instead it led to his downfall and ushered in the rise of the conservative movement in America. In “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?” Kevin Mattson gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the weeks leading up to Carter’s “malaise” speech, a period of great upheaval in the United States: the energy crisis had resulted in mile-long gas lines, inciting suburban riots and violence…”
SUBURBAN RIOTS AND VIOLENCE
This was over having to wait in line for gas. It is truly scary to think what is going to happen when Americans have to wait in line for food, and water is rationed. Does anyone think that is going to be calm and peaceful?
I don’t know exactly what to think but I would really rather not wait for Pearl Harbor to happen before we support our Congress to vote yes for a climate policy.
Joe, the quoted phrase was a correction for “especially of it were extended”, which I thought was too stupid-looking to not fix.
The remark about grammar-checking was just a sad joke given the present state of blog comment software.
Steve,
Hate to have to correct your correction, (well OK that’s not true I’m really rather enjoying it) but if I understand correctly, you’re saying it should be if it was. If it was something in the past it would be if it was but as it is, it ain’t. So it shouldn’t be was it should be were. As it were. Or rather, as it was.
Clear?
If you look up conditional tenses, it will be fascinating reading. And if you WERE to look up conditional tenses, it would be also. See?
malfunction? disbarment? I’ve tried twice to post a response to your response to my etc. but it doesn’t appear.
[JR: Probably just the upgrade.]
Joe, in your response to my response to your…etc. you say rapid action later is impossible without this bill now.
The Patriot Act says au contraire. We are capable of remarkably fast running when we’re scared. (usually in the direction of daddy’s strong arms, aka authoritarianism, but we can work on that. National therapy and a wise leader saying the right things to people who feel victimized by liberal policies will help. If only we could elect a wise leader…)
I share your unexpressed desires for a rational, reality-driven electorate, but fear you are giving too much credit to the public, without much evidence as far as I can see. Unfortunately, because people are not very well educated and have extremely short memories and Attention Deficit Disorder triggered by TV and tabloids, Republican lies usually work. The vast majority of people will forget or minimize that Republicans/ corporations/ denialists worked against climate action because they will constantly be told something else. (I can’t wait to find out exactly what bizarre lies they will find that work.) Diabolically brilliant conservatives like Rove and Atwater using advertising and radio/TV talk shows will make it seem like the climate bill was their idea, or that the answer to climate change is nuclear, military and maybe, yes, a few bird-killing windmills, (the production and deployment of which, once they are controlled at a few chokepoints by Shell, BP and Exxon-Mobil, will suddenly and strangely not be the cause of bird deaths anymore and there will be a massive and effective PR campaign to say so. And oddly, it will probably never once mention bird deaths.) Corporate and neocon desires are not likely to change; they will still probably be interested in delaying and minimizing real climate/ ecology action and even more interested in controlling it, profiting from it and keeping it from threatening privatized corporate-crony capitalism—of the disaster capitalism variety among others.
Just an aside: “Pearl Harbor” is a metaphor and I include in it the likelihood that it will not be a single event but multiple ones. Neither was Pearl Harbor a single event; it was years of actions and opinions and news reports about Hitler and Germany and Italy as well as Japan. It was racism and impulses toward democracy and FDR’s years of preparation and propaganda, decades of built-up piled up fears, hatreds, sympathies and many other things. All things are multidetermined, that is, everything that happens has many causes. If it doesn’t have many causes (as well as enabling factors and a relative lack of preventing factors) it doesn’t happen. The Republicans have been brilliant at using that (unconsciously maybe but that’s not important). We have to get good at it—using the liberal equivalents of Terry Schiavo and gay marriage to win the Lakoffian struggle for the imagination of the US public. Making pleas for muddy compromises doesn’t do that. Standing up for principles and expressing our values and getting our symbols out does. The momentarily defeated but unbowed hero who in the end turns out to be right is a much more powerful force than the foot soldier who went along with the army but never got a chance to fire his rifle. We need to branch out, win that struggle in all other fields and then we can, with our majority of true (as opposed to blue dog) allies take rapid, bold and effective action to avoid the worst effects of climate catastrophe.