Sheldon Whitehouse has a dead-end climate strategy
We deserve so much better leadership on climate change than the Democratic Party has on offer. For evidence, look no further than yesterday’s interview with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse by Jeff Stein of Vox.
It is a glib, blinkered and uninspiring performance by Sen. Whitehouse, the man “widely seen as the Senate’s most active advocate on climate change.” If this guy is supposed to be our champion, we need some new champions, fast.
Let’s start with the most egregious moment, which comes near the end. Whitehouse has been touting the existence of Republican senators who are supposedly interested in making a deal on a carbon tax.
Stein: I’m curious why you think the six to 10 Republican senators you’ve been talking to feel interested in working on climate change.
Whitehouse: The reputation of the Republican Party is at stake here. If you want to have a valid Republican Party 10 years from now, you can’t have a generation of people that grows up seeing the Republican Party as climate deniers.
I’m sorry, are you fucking kidding me? Republican senators are going to do something about climate change because the reputation of their Party is at stake? The Republican Party that has spent the last eight years fanatically working to take away life-saving healthcare from 25 million people? The Republican Party that is fast becoming the proud political home of white supremacy?
The Republicans are past the point of being worried about their reputation. And if they are, climate change is the least of their worries.
Besides, if your main leverage point were reputational damage, you would morally condemn Republicans for their cowardice on climate change. You would join up with outside groups (like the one I’m a part of, Sunrise) to rally a grassroots movement to hound them at every opportunity, the way healthcare advocates have.
But Sen. Whitehouse shows no interest in doing that. Instead, he bends over backwards in this interview to rehabilitate the Republicans’ reputation for them. He takes pains to distinguish “the fossil fuel industry and their huge array of smelly, scandalous front groups” from the good Republicans like Hank Paulsen, James Baker, Lindsey Graham, the American Enterprise Institute.
Hold on — the American Enterprise Institute? The same American Enterprise Institute that in 2007 offered $10,000 to any scientist willing to undermine the IPCC climate report? Yep, that one.
The Koch-funded AEI supports a carbon tax (as does ExxonMobil, by the way) because they received too much heat for their previous position of outright climate denial. Now, they view it as expedient to acknowledge climate change, but endorse only the bare minimum climate policy — a small carbon tax. AEI and Exxon’s strategy is to draw political attention towards an incomplete policy that wouldn’t seriously damage the fossil fuel industry, and distract from other policies that could end fossil fuels altogether.
It seems to be working. Somewhere, an Exxon lobbyist lit a cigar after reading this interview.
And then there’s the policy itself. Stein asks if there is a climate equivalent of Medicare For All, a bold demand that could rally the Democratic base and offer an aspirational vision for the society we wish to create. Here’s Whitehouse:
We have a [Republican] party with a considerable number of elected [officials] who are not only willing but eager to do a bill of some kind on climate change. They have signaled…that the way they want to do that is with a price on carbon. That’s the conservative way to do it…. I’m happy with a carbon fee. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. So there’s not, like, some idea on the horizon that we’re far from but want to try to guide toward. We have an immediate virtual yes from the Republicans about this; we have an immediate problem that we have to solve sooner than later. Trajectory points on the horizon aren’t part of our battle in climate.
Whitehouse seems to be arguing that a Republican-endorsed carbon tax would solve the problem entirely, rendering “trajectory points on the horizon” unnecessary. This is so wrong I can hardly believe he said it.
As David Roberts details in his well-titled piece “Putting a price on carbon is a fine idea. It’s not the end-all be-all,” a carbon tax is only one small piece of the full legislative package we need to halt climate change:
We need to reduce emissions a lot — to zero, or close to it — as fast as possible. That’s going to require more than changes at the margins. It’s going to require phasing out virtually our entire installed industrial base and replacing it with new, low-carbon technologies and practices. It’s going to require an explosion of innovation and building, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution — only much, much faster, constrained by a tight carbon budget.
We know price-based policies like [a carbon tax] can efficiently generate marginal changes…. But can price-based policies drive economy-wide energy transitions?
History doesn’t seem to offer any examples. Large-scale energy transitions of the past have generally been driven by [direct regulation of industry] and technology innovation.
Comprehensive policy to overhaul virtually all of our energy, agricultural and transit infrastructure — that needs to be the goal on the horizon. But Whitehouse doesn’t have anything to say about that. He’s content to celebrate a carbon tax as “the” solution to climate change, and pay for it with a horrendous corporate tax cut that would put money back in the pockets of the same rich people who caused the climate crisis. Great.
I don’t doubt Whitehouse’s sincere desire to stop climate change. I imagine he knows a carbon tax is not the be-all end-all, but he’s desperate to get something done and he thinks it will help if he says it is. I imagine he knows Lindsey Graham is a spineless sycophant, but the way of the Senate is to avoid saying things like that.
Unfortunately, desperation leads to clouded thinking, and the Senate is a place where principled people slowly lose touch with reality. Our would-be champion is not inspiring much confidence.
It’s up to the grassroots climate movement to unite behind an ambitious policy vision, equivalent to Medicare For All, that could be used to push Whitehouse and the rest of the Senate. They clearly need it. More on this soon.
