Only the GOP Can Act on Climate Change

Americans looking for comprehensive climate and energy legislation may have to depend on a Republican president to get the job done.

On Thursday, July 27, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced the abandonment of comprehensive climate and energy legislation despite months of effort. Environmental groups and political pundits were quick to point fingers, with everyone from the fossil fuel industry to Republican and moderate Democratic senators to Reid himself held responsible. But significant ire has actually been reserved for President Barack Obama, with Rolling Stone citing the possibility that he “doesn’t have the spine for this fight.” Politico encapsulated the widespread criticism of the president:

Many say it was Obama who didn’t do enough to make the climate bill a big enough priority, allowing other monster big-ticket items like the economic stimulus, health care and Wall Street reform to suck up all the oxygen and leaving environmentalists grasping for straws too late in the game – well past the expiration date for other big accomplishments during the 111th Congress. “The absence of direct, intense presidential leadership doomed this process,” said Eric Pooley, author of “Climate War,” a just-published book that chronicles the past three years of debate on global warming. “We did have a window there, and now the window is shut.”

The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, observed that President Obama had been “largely AWOL in the fight, didn’t speak up in the final innings, though his run for the White House was partly built on environmental appeals.” In October 2008, then-candidate Obama did in fact declare “There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy...That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.” Nevertheless, the president – armed with a Democratic Congress amidst the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history – could not get the job done.

New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin presented an intriguing idea: “Could it be that the White House has concluded what some political analysts have quietly told me — that only a Republican president could muster the Senate votes to pass a meaningful climate bill?” The cap-and-trade framework that dominates the contemporary debate over climate legislation, after all, was partly an invention of the first Bush administration. Furthermore, a study found that “over the last four decades, almost 70 percent of major federal environmental protection legislation has been brought about by the combination of a Republican president and an all-Democratic Congress.” And prior to 2010, some of the most meaningful legislative proposals on the subject – including the Climate Stewardship Acts of 2003, 2005, and 2007 and the Climate Security Act of 2008 – were authored by Republicans, Senators John McCain and John Warner, respectively. President Obama’s short stint in the Senate, of course, saw no such leadership on his part.

Bradford Plumer of The New Republic goes as far as to posit, “If McCain had won in 2008, with Democrats controlling both the House and Senate, then it’s quite possible we'd have a climate bill by now.” The political reality is that with environmentalism having long been a province of the left, a liberal like President Obama will always be hard-pressed to win Republican votes for climate legislation in Congress, but a more moderate Republican president in the vein of McCain can attract support from both sides of the aisle. Counterintuitive though it may be, Americans looking for comprehensive climate and energy legislation may have to turn to a Republican president to get the job done.