New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza is back with the magazine after taking a considerable amount of time left to write a book about Barack Obama.
His first piece back is a blockbuster about the ultimately failed negotiations for the U.S. Senate to produce a climate change bill this past year.
The key players were John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham. Being the only Republican would make Graham crucial to the success or failure of the bill, and as Lizza reports, Graham felt undercut too many times before walking away from the proceedings.
Part of the lengthy article concerns how many other Republicans might be able to just say no to the Senate leadership led by Mitch McConnell and support the Obama/Democratic led plan. Lizza writes that one of those Republicans the Democrats were looking to persuade was Florida's George LeMieux.
He had been appointed by the Florida governor, Charlie Crist, who was then running in a tight Republican primary for the seat against another Tea Party favorite, Marco Rubio. LeMieux couldn’t do anything that would complicate Crist’s life. In a private meeting with the three senators in December, he told them that he couldn’t publicly associate himself with the bill. But, according to someone who was present, he added, “My heart’s with you.”
But on Monday afternoon, LeMieux vigorously denied that he was going to support which was better known as "cap-and-trade." LeMieux tweeted that, "NewYorker piece is wrong. Care about energy indepth, but never favored cap & tax— would cost Florida familes 30% in energy costs."
Another part of the story confirms the power that Fox News holds – with all elected officials, not simply the White House, which demonstrated in the Shirley Sherrod incident earlier this year that they pay big time attention to the conservative but top ranked cable news network.
But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’ ”
You might recall how President Obama shocked and angered environmentalists in March when he announced he was looking at increasing offshore drilling, including off of Florida's coast. As Lizza reports, that announcement (which also included nuclear power coming back in the mix) was all part of the negotiating with Senators like Graham to get GOP buy-in to support the climate change bill. There's also this unfortunate comment made here by Carol Browner that doesn't look so great in retrospect:
In March of 2009, a senior White House official outlined a strategy for a “grand bargain,” in which Democrats would capitulate to Republicans on some long-cherished environmental beliefs in exchange for a cap on carbon emissions. “You need to have something like T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore holding hands,” the White House official told me. In exchange for setting a cap on emissions, Democrats would agree to an increase in the production of natural gas (the only thing that Pickens, the Texas oil-and-gas billionaire, cared about), nuclear power, and offshore oil. If Republicans didn’t respond to the proposed deals, the White House could push them to the table by making a threat through the Environmental Protection Agency, which had recently been granted power to regulate carbon, just as it regulates many other air pollutants.
The strategy had risks, including the possibility that expanded drilling off America’s coast could lead to a dangerous spill. But Browner, the head of the E.P.A. for eight years under Clinton, seemed to think the odds of that were limited. “Carol Browner says the fact of the matter is that the technology is so good that after Katrina there was less spillage from those platforms than the amount you spill in a year filling up your car with gasoline,” the White House official said. “So, given that, she says realistically you could expand offshore drilling.”
With Republicans poised to gain a substantial amount of seats next month, climate change legislation may be further away than ever.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2010.