Cap and Trade is Dead. Who's to Blame?

So what happened? How did a Democratic President who came to office talking up climate change and promising a strong carbon cap, plus a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives, plus the late impetus of the oil spill, somehow come away with barely more than nothing? As a stunned environmental community sifts through the wreckage, they'll find no shortage of perpetrators. -The filibuster and the Republicans: It should go without saying at this point, but the increasing reliance on the filibuster has made the U.S. Senate a deeply, deeply dysfunctional body—and the Republicans, who were nearly lockstep against any climate legislation with a cap, were only to happy to abuse it. It was always going to be difficult to get any kind of carbon cap passed in the Senate... The Democrats: While it's true that the filibuster present a high barrier for any climate and energy action, the reality is that Reid may have struggled to get even 51 votes for a stronger bill, because a number of Democrats were almost as obstructionist as their Republican colleagues. Coal state Democrats like Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and George Voinovic Evan Bayh of Indiana were almost certainly never going to vote for a bill with a carbon cap, knowing what it might do to the coal industry. Farm state Democrats like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska weren't any better. The truth is there weren't enough Democrats willing to support a carbon cap, let along Republicans... The White House: It's all Obama's fault—that's the message that many more liberal greens are coalescing around. For all his talk in the campaign about climate change and the need to get a price on carbon (during the campaign he called to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050), Obama seemed generally detached from the Congressional fight over climate legislation. Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth noted that Obama never gave a substantial speech focused on the need for the U.S. to face up to the long-terms of climate change and truly take energy innovation seriously; never brought climate researchers to speak to his White House staff...-Environmentalists: Over the past few years, most environmental groups have made climate change their number one priority. And within that—led by wonky organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and especially the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)—shooting for an economy-wide carbon cap was the number one tool. A price on carbon was the only way, the market-oriented way, to reduce emissions and fight climate change. Put a cap on carbon and businesses would respond, changing the way they used energy, funding innovative new cleantech startups and ushering in an era of green jobs. That was the great green pitch—trust me, I've been getting it almost every day, in various ways, for the past two years. That pitch failed...more