New York Times Editorial: The Senate’s Duty on Climate

New York Times Editorial: The Senate’s Duty on Climate
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22sun2.html?_r=1&ref=global


The news that world leaders have abandoned hope for a comprehensive, legally binding climate change treaty in Copenhagen next month inspired no end of finger-pointing. Environmentalists blamed eight years of inaction under George W. Bush. The Europeans noted that the Chinese and several other big developing nations had done little to move the ball forward.

Our own candidate for criticism is the United States Senate. We cannot rewrite the Bush years any more than we can persuade the Chinese of the merits of a binding treaty to control greenhouse gases. What the United States can do is assume responsibility for its own emissions, and this the Senate has manifestly failed to do.

It is asking a lot of the Senate to address health care and climate change at the same time, although the House managed to do both. It is also true that a preoccupied White House has applied almost no pressure. But the indecisiveness of the Senate’s Democratic leaders is worrisome, as is the Republicans’ reflexive and virtually unanimous hostility to anything that challenges the way this country produces and uses energy.

There are exceptions. The Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Jeff Bingaman have produced bills that could form the basis of a broad measure curbing emissions and ushering in alternative energy sources. But Harry Reid, the majority leader, seems at times like a man who wishes the climate change issue would go away. Last week, he suggested that he could not bring a bill forward until “sometime in the spring,” and that even then it would be sold as an economic stimulus bill.

With very few exceptions, the Republicans have behaved terribly. They refused en masse to show up when Ms. Boxer tried to get a committee vote on a bill, claiming they had been denied an analysis of the bill’s impact on the economy. When Ms. Boxer summoned officials to provide such an analysis, they boycotted again.

This sends a bad signal to the rest of the world. In Beijing, Mr. Obama suggested that the United States would be willing to put some “emission reduction targets” on the table in Copenhagen. These would be aspirational, not binding, and would presumably reflect the goals contained in the House bill, which calls for a 17 percent reduction in United States emissions by 2020. Their main purpose would be to show that the United States is committed to change. But how credible can even this modest goal be if the Senate is largely indifferent?

Though there is no chance the Senate will produce a bill in the next three weeks, we have a modest suggestion. That is for Mr. Obama to appear quickly and publicly with Ms. Boxer, Mr. Bingaman, Mr. Reid, and climate stalwarts like John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham (a Republican outlier) and announce that climate change will be an early order of business next year and that he will not rest until he gets a bill.