When will Joe Romm of Center for American Progress acknowledge that his strategy on climate change has failed?
Yesterday the LA Times published our argument that voters have rejected raising energy prices to deal with global warming. Meteor Blades wrote a nice post about our argument. It's a long-ish op-ed, here's a summary:
As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America's growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling -- particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling -- to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted "Drill, baby, drill!" Obama's point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.
Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings -- or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore's. After the release of the documentary film and book "An Inconvenient Truth," greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. In fact, public concern about global warming was about the same before the movie -- 65% told a Gallup poll in 2007 that global warming was a somewhat or very important concern in comparison to 63% in 1989. Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press' top 20 priorities.
By contrast, public concern about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically. While liberals and environmentalists were congratulating themselves on the triumph of climate science over fossil-fuel-funded ignorance, planning inauguration parties and writing legislation for the next Democratic president and Congress, gas prices became the second-highest concern after the economy, according to Gallup.
This summer, elite opinion ran headlong into American popular opinion. The train wreck happened in the Senate and went by the name of the Climate Security Act. That bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would have, by all accounts (even the authors'), increased gasoline and energy prices. Despite clear evidence that energy-price anxiety was rising, Democrats brought the bill to the Senate floor in June when gas prices were well over $4 a gallon in most of the country. Republicans were all too happy to join that fight.
Joe Romm at Center for American Progress made the outrageous claim that we had attacked Obama.
Here's my open letter to Joe.
Joe,
You’re just pissed because reality keeps getting in the way of your ideology.
Your strategy, as usual, is to shoot the messenger rather than confront the facts. This is what you did when you attacked Nature for publishing Roger Pielke, Chris Greene, and Tom Wigley's "Dangerous Assumptions" about faster-than-expected emissions increases. This is what you did when the International Energy Agency came out and said that stabilization requires technology "breakthroughs" (their word). This is what you did when you attacked those of us who support adaptation as "delayers." And this is what you are doing in response to the accumulating evidence that governments won’t raise the price of dirty energy to deal with global warming.
Joe, you find or make up the facts to fit whatever tirade you want to launch. It was for this reason that you approvingly cited Pielke et al. in your post at Cato Unbound when you wanted to break from the IPCC. It was for this reason that you made up your own projections for warming and impacts, rather than relying on the IPCC projections, in your response to Manzi during the same debate. It was for this reason that you called your made-up wedges a "solution"for achieving stabilization even though your wedges are nothing more than a laundry list of technologies. And it’s for this reason that you made up the outrageous whopper of a lie that we "go after Obama" when you know full well that the ones we went after were greens and liberals like you who cling to an outmoded pollution pricing paradigm.
Your view is not complicated, it’s just wrong. You think that we just have to continue explaining to people that global warming is the coming apocalypse so that they will accept regulations that raise the cost of gasoline and electricity. The whole purpose of your blog is to enforce message and policy orthodoxy among people who are concerned about climate change. Anyone who strays from the herd gets smeared by you as a "denier" or a "delayer."
But look at what's happened to your theory about how political change will occur. From 2006 to 2008 there was an unprecedented amount of attention about global warming. Gore's film because one of the biggest documentary films in history. He won the Oscar and the Nobel and was on virtually every major magazine cover in the country. Media companies from Sports Illustrated to NBC went green. Politicians marched around declaring climate change the most important issue in the world, and their state the greenest in all the land.
Most liberals, including you, came to believe that "everything had changed" -- action was right around the corner.
And then reality settled in. Cap and trade had less support in the Senate in June 2008 than it did in 2003 when it received 43 votes and less support in 2005 when it received 38 votes. Republicans simply had to point out the obvious, that the legislation would raise energy prices, and Democrats jumped ship. Reid had to step in to orchestrate a cloture vote to avoid an embarrassing vote on the legislation. Republicans were so pleased with the power of their argument that they doubled down and attacked Democrats on drilling. Within a few weeks Democrats had reversed their opposition to expanded off-shore oil drilling. High gas prices, which should have been owned by the opposition party, was stolen by the incumbent party.
In following the raise-energy-prices-to-deal-with-climate strategy peddled by you and the green groups, Democrats got beat. You know it, we know it, and Democrats are increasingly starting to realize it. No amount of your usual histrionics will distract attention away from the egg on your face.
Michael