In the battle for passage of the climate bill, offshore oil drilling may have been the bait that finally convinced Senator Lindsey Graham to reach across the aisle and work with Senator John Kerry for passage.
Offshore drilling may be luring Senator Lisa Murkowski as we speak (I've adopted her, and I'll have a profile of her up tomorrow).
But who's shilling for whom, and who's just being a pill? Below the fold, some thoughts on Chicago-style hardball, long term economics, and three little words.
First, for anyone who hasn't followed news on the Kerry-Boxer climate bill (Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, aka CEJAPA, aka S. 1733), the week began with a New York Times op-ed coauthored by Kerry and Graham: Yes We Can Pass Climate Change Legislation. The 800 page bill doesn't mention offshore drilling at all. Nor do any of the summaries, overviews, and explanations found on Senator Kerry's website.
Last week, the NYT ran an oddly prescient Offshore Drilling Could Add, Subtract Support for Climate Bill. Today, political analyst Nate Silver of 538 has a detailed analysis: Can offshore drilling save the climate bill? concluding that an offshore drilling provision might pick up 2-4 votes:
So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham's vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski's. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.
It's more complicated than that.
Within hours of the op-ed, the LA Times was reporting that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration wanted to severely limit offshore drilling in environmentally sensitive areas. NOAA's report recommended excluding large tracts of the Alaska coast, the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico from Interior's draft offshore drilling plan for 2010 to 2015. "The agency calls for a ban on drilling in the Arctic until oil companies greatly improve their ability to prevent and clean up oil spills. And it asks Interior to delay new drilling plans until an Obama administration ocean policy task force completes its work late this year." (NOAA's recommendations are respected but not binding.)
By a strange coincidence, the report was finished in early September, but didn't surface in the national media for over a month, within a few hours of the Kerry-Graham op-ed. In other words, the Obama administration may be playing Chicago-style political hardball. The NOAA may be an indirect threat to Graham, Murkowski, and the like: pass the bill, or you'll never drill again.
Some climate change advocates believe that getting CEJAPA passed is worth making promises regarding offshore drilling. For example, Joe Romm at ClimateProgress believes that if/when oil prices rise above $100-150/barrel, political pressure on Democrats to open up new areas for drilling will be immense; so we might as well make a deal in return. Romm has also laid out the cruel hoax of offshore oil drilling: American oil companies already control 34 billion barrels offshore, and a complete end to the offshore moratorium will only open up 8 billion barrels; offshore oil drilling has such a long lead time that the oil won't be accessible until 2030; and extracting the oil may never be cost-effective.
By 2030, we will be in an entirely different, brave new world. We may have made a smooth transition to power from cleaner sources, such that oil and gas may be of more interest to historians than economists. Carbon caps may be so successful that using the oil may never be cost-effective. Or we may be so desperate for oil that Democrats will be clamoring for it...in which case, we might as well have negotiated something in exchange. I'm not thrilled about offshore oil drilling, but I'm even less thrilled by the prospect of being unable to pass a meaningful climate change bill.
Look again at the Senators' words. Kerry and Graham together wrote:
In addition, we are committed to seeking compromise on additional onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration — work that was started by a bipartisan group in the Senate last Congress. Any exploration must be conducted in an environmentally sensitive manner and protect the rights and interests of our coastal states.
I've highlighted three words for one reason. Of those three little words, the first two bother me as much as the third -- and no one has considered them yet.