Editorial: Behind the energy failure in Congress

Ed Markey's exasperation is fully justified.

Rep. Markey, D-7th, spent years building a piece of legislation that would be the nation's most significant step toward achieving energy independence and reducing the growth in carbon emissions blamed for global climate change. After 34 years in the House, Markey knows as well as anyone that lawmaking isn't about grand ideas and rhetorical flourishes; it's about consensus-building, compromises and making whatever deals are necessary to get a bill passed.

Markey made those deals and won significant support for his cap-and-trade bill, a market-based approach designed to create incentives for the development of clean, reliable, renewable, domestic energy. As he explained last week to the Daily News editorial board, the Waxman-Markey bill had the support of key lobbies and industries across the country: General Electric, General Motors, military generals, the nuclear power industry, the Edison Electric Institute, and some of the nation's leading electric utilities - as well as the top environmental groups.

That was enough to get Waxman-Markey through the House, but the Senate is another story. There, the bill ran into two industries that see alternative energy as a threat - and the senators whose first loyalty is to those industries. Markey cited two states in particular: Kentucky, where coal is king and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell wants to keep it that way, and Oklahoma, an oil state with two GOP senators wedded to Big Oil's agenda.

The Senate also has rules, dubbed "a huge historic mistake" by Markey, that make it all too easy for a determined minority party to stop any and all legislative progress. In this session, the House has passed some 350 bills that the Senate has yet to bring to the floor. That includes energy and climate legislation, which Senate Democrats have reluctantly pronounced dead for this session.

Markey is frustrated, but remains optimistic. He points to this summer's growing toll of weather-related disasters: massive floods in Pakistan, record drought in Russia, the iceberg four times the size of Manhattan slipping off Greenland into the North Atlantic. Surely people will soon see that climate change is a reality, not a theory. He points to China's ascendance in green energy, the most important new industry of the 21st century. Surely, Republican entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and industrialists will soon see the opportunities that would come from a realignment of federal policies that now favor the fossil fuels industry. Surely, even Republicans will figure out that "the biggest energy tax is the $300 billion we pay for imported oil, which makes up fully 45 percent of our trade deficit."

Surely, someday, but we can't share Markey's optimism, at least in the short-term. With Democrats likely to lose seats, and perhaps their majorities, in Congress in November, it's hard to imagine the next Congress being more open to climate legislation than this one.

Markey's own orientation illustrates part of the problem. Markey's long tenure in Congress has taught him that legislative progress comes from the confluence of economic and political interests. But it isn't just that selfish interests are committed to stopping energy and climate legislation. It's that there hasn't been enough popular support outside Washington to overcome their resistance.

Consider this: We can't think of a single election in the last decade where climate change has been an important issue, let alone a pivotal one. That reflects poorly on the environmental movement, which has spent too much time lobbying in Washington and too little mobilizing support among voters, and on politicians - Barack Obama included - who haven't made these issues a campaign priority.

Maybe it will take even more climate-related disasters and another big spike in oil prices to build public support for policy changes that are already long overdue. It will certainly take stronger, more vocal leadership, from politicians of all stripes.

The MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News