America Is Uniquely Awful At Climate Legislation; Its In Our Constitutional DNA And Govt. Structure

[hatrack]

A Democratic president was in the White House. The Democratic Party held a majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. But a single senator — a moderate Democrat from West Virginia — blocked the White House’s preferred climate plan. No, this wasn’t 2021 — the year was 1993: Jurassic Park had just been released, Bill Clinton was president, and atmospheric carbon dioxide was only 357 parts per million (it’s 415 ppm today). Senator Robert Byrd of fossil-fuel laden West Virginia was the chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, and without his support, the Clinton administration couldn’t pass a tax on carbon emissions to address climate change. The White House opted to support an energy tax instead, which passed the House but, faced with substantial opposition and fossil-fuel lobbying, never became law.

It was the first climate policy failure of many. Four years later, Byrd spearheaded a resolution that prevented the U.S. from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Other efforts to pass climate legislation stalled nearly every year after. Indeed, the last three decades of U.S. climate policy look like a graveyard of failed bills: Carbon taxes have died on the Senate floor and been torched by attack ads. Cap-and-trade systems have been endorsed — and then abandoned — by Republicans and Democrats alike.

According to the Climate Change Performance Index, the U.S. is 55th in the world when it comes to climate policy; another analysis by Yale University and Columbia University ranked the country 24th for environmental performance. Now, as Democrats struggle to regroup after current West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s refusal to support President Joe Biden’s landmark climate and social welfare bill, it seems to be happening again. The U.S. is within reach of passing climate policy, but perilously close to falling short.

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That’s because in most democracies, it’s easier to block change than to create it. And the United States government, with its separation of powers baked into the Constitution, offers many more opportunities for blocking than other democracies. “The United States has a lot of what in political science are called ‘veto points,’” Mildenberger explained. “There’s a lot of different individuals in different places that can block a policy, all the way from having a majority in the House of Representatives to having a really conservative Supreme Court.” Those “veto points” have been visible in many of the U.S.’s major climate flops to date. In 2009, a cap-and-trade bill, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s climate strategy, died in the Senate after it became clear that Democrats could not rustle up 60 “yes” votes to overcome the filibuster. (The filibuster: a veto point.) Later, Obama’s back-up plan — an order to require utilities to switch over to clean sources of electricity — was challenged in the courts and never implemented. (The courts: another veto point.) Then, in 2017, President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, even though the treaty was non-binding. (Executive action: yet another veto point.) Every time climate advocates have tried to push through change, the story has been distinctly American: veto point, veto point, veto point.

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https://grist.org/politics/is-american-democracy-uniquely-bad-at-tackling-climate-change/

[Mickju]

1. Conservatives are destroying this country and the world.