Climate Change Lobbying

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity reveals that the number of global warming lobbyists has increased by more than 300 percent in the past five years. The Center found that just in the past year some 770 companies hired over 2,000 climate change lobbyists and spent an estimated $90 million to influence federal policy on climate change.

Although the explosive growth of the climate change lobby has also seen an increase in those lobbying for alternative energy and environmental and health issues, they are far outnumbered by other interests by eight-to-one. Some of these other interests include the US Chamber of Commerce; the National Association of Manufacturers; large coal, oil and gas companies; Wall Street banks; and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Their lobbyists include powerful former Congress members, White House staffers, and officials from previous administrations.

The report cites NASA scientist James Hansen’s warning that “special interests will dilute and torque government policies, causing the climate to pass tipping points, with grave consequences for all life on the planet.”

While policy has been standing still on climate for the last few years, the special interests have not been standing still. They’ve been really redoubling their efforts, and they’ve quadrupled in number the lobbyists over the last five years.

Not only have the energy companies and the manufacturers increased their efforts, but a whole range of new interests have joined in. For example, Wall Street and private equity firms, finance firms, insurance companies like AIG, they were not on the scene at all in 2003. Last year, they had as many lobbyists as alternative energy did, and they’re engaged, of course, in the whole idea of a carbon market. So, they have that interest.

We also see cities and counties and public agencies also are lobbying in great numbers, trying to get a piece of the revenue that might be brought in from a climate program. So it’s going to be a very complicated scene as lawmakers try to put together a policy

the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. They are a brand new organization. They represent forty-eight coal-mining companies, the coal-hauling railroads, the coal-burning utilities. And they decided to really have a much more strong presence. a lot of the analysis is that we are decades away from that technology, and the planet may not be able to wait that long, and there may be other solutions at hand that we should be trying first.

The clean coal industry has not only a very big organization itself, but they’ve hired, for example, Jack Quinn, who was a former counsel to President Clinton in the White House. He also was a former aide to Al Gore when he was vice president. You find that a lot of the climate interests are hiring Democratic lobbyists, because, of course, the Democrats are now in power in Washington.

The idea of cap and trade really is to set a limit on carbon emissions but give businesses some flexibility on how they meet those limits. It worked with acid rain pollution. We’ve been able to reduce much faster, much more cheaply than anyone said, the sulfur dioxide pollution from power plants. Carbon is much more ubiquitous. And the idea is that if a power company can’t reduce its carbon emissions, it can instead invest money in, say, a wind farm or a forestry project, and that—or an agriculture project.

The problem is, there will have to be monitoring of—are these investments real? Are the reductions real? Are they verifiable? There is going to be lots of even businesses springing up to monitor and really have oversight over this system, this kind of system. That’s why someone like James Hansen, Dr. Hansen, he’s saying, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t go with this cap and trade; maybe we should just tax the fossil fuel industry and rebate the money to the customers, to the consumers who will be paying for electricity.

every careful analysis that’s looked at approaches to reducing fossil fuel emissions has concluded that we’re going to have to make progress in a whole bunch of different areas. We’re going to have to make progress in conservation, things like not cutting down tropical forests; in efficiency; in improving buildings, improving vehicles, improving transportation systems. We’re going to have to make progress in new technologies, things like bringing additional solar and wind, wave energy online. And we’re probably going to have to make some progress in finding ways to capture CO2 from technologies that’s already being released, what’s called carbon capture and storage.

Discussion: Chris Field, Marianne Lavelle

Marianne Lavelle, Staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity.

Chris Field, Founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and a professor of biology and environmental earth System science at Stanford University. He is also co-chair of Working Group 2 of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

– from democracynow

Lobbying is stupid. Better call it bribing.