While the call by Hillary Clinton and John McCain to suspend the gasoline tax is unquestionably a crass pander to working class swing voters more concerned about rising energy prices than global warming, it is also a warning to Democrats that dealing with global warming by raising energy prices is not a sustainable political strategy.
Next month the Senate will take up legislation -- "cap and trade" -- that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions and increase the price of electricity from fossil fuels. Coal companies -- whose advertisements during the Democratic presidential debates were a shot across the Party's bow-- are already gearing up to run a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at stoking voter fears of higher energy prices.
Remember the insurance industry's "Harry and Louise" ad, where a husband and wife fretted about the cost of the Clinton health care plan? Well Harry and Louise will soon be back in American living rooms, courtesy of the fossil fuel lobby. Only this time they'll be worrying about how much global warming legislation will raise their energy bills.
Democratic leaders in the Senate are plowing ahead, ignoring the fact that they have sailed these treacherous waters before. In 1993, President Clinton and Vice President Gore proposed a new tax on energy. While they succeeded in persuading Democrats in the House to vote for it, Democratic Senators balked, and the measure failed. Many House Democrats who voted for the measure lost reelection in 1994, and several pointed to the energy tax as one of the main reasons.
This time is different, environmental leaders insist. The public is more concerned about global warming today than ever before, and the regulations they are proposing aren't technically a tax, even if they will end up raising electricity prices. Such over-confidence has been the death of green efforts in the past. On the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, environmental leaders were so sure that the public was on their side that they loaded up a ballot initiative, known as "Big Green," with dozens of new regulations on everything from chemicals to carbon. A few months later the economy slid into recession and that November voters rejected Big Green by a whopping two-to-one margin.
Anticipating opposition of the "Harry and Louise" variety, Senate leaders are expected to dilute the global warming cap with loopholes and safety valves that prevent the price of carbon dioxide pollution -- and thus the price of electricity -- from rising very high. And while this may be good politics, the result will be legislation that has little impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
Democratic and environmental leaders insist that the global warming cap and trade pollution law will be as effective as the 1990 Clean Air Act on acid rain, which capped sulfur dioxide emissions and allowed companies to buy and sell reductions in emissions to each other. But whereas the past "cap and trade" law required coal companies to install inexpensive scrubbers to smokestacks, or purchase low-sulfur coal from Wyoming and New Mexico, overcoming global warming requires a whole new energy infrastructure -- such as new transmission lines to bring wind power from the Dakotas and solar power from the Southwest to big cities -- as well as new, expensive technologies, from solar and wind, to coal plants that capture and store their emissions.
This is already playing out in Europe. The European Union has set a fairly high price for polluting carbon dioxide -- about $38 per ton of carbon dioxide -- but it is still cheaper for European energy companies to build new coal plants and purchase off-sets, which is why Europe is today on a coal-building boom, despite the cost it has imposed on polluters. While estimates vary, few expect U.S. climate legislation to result in a carbon dioxide price above $30 per ton for the foreseeable future.
There is a better way. Truly dealing with global warming not just in the U.S. but also in China, which passed the U.S. in emissions last year, requires making clean energy as cheap as possible, as quickly as possible. The good news is that doing so is far more popular politically than increasing the cost of electricity at a time when public anxiety over the economy is rising. Voters overwhelmingly support this objective, and Gallup found last year that 65 percent of voters support spending at least $30 billion a year to do it. A poll conducted by Oakland polling firm EMC Research for the environmental Nathan Cummings Foundation last fall found that voters favored large government investments over cap and trade 84 to 62 percent before arguments were made against it, and 54 to 46 percent after arguments were read.
Just before the 1990 election, a Sierra Club spokesperson told a newspaper, ""If Big Green loses, it will look like the movement cannot translate the rhetoric of Earth Day into the reality of Election Day." The 38th Earth Day has come and gone. If the environmental movement is to finally translate its rhetoric into reality, it will need to shift its focus from making dirty energy expensive to making clean energy cheap.
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.