Political Gas

During the presidential campaign, George Bush said he would move quickly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a major source of greenhouse gases, from US power plants. And, he added with his customary smirk: "Unlike Al Gore, my reductions won't be voluntary. They'll be mandatory." Bush even mentioned the phrase "global warming" in his feel-good State of the Union address, saying that global warming was a real threat and that he was going to take action to combat it.

In early March, Bush's EPA director Christie Todd Whitman reiterated this message in Trieste, Italy, to a gathering of European environment ministers, who have been griping for years about American foot-dragging on global warming. Whitman's assurances were duly leaked to the press. Editorialists across the country swooned; conservatives, who hate Whitman for her pro-choice views, howled in protest. Then suddenly the plank was sawed off beneath her. Bush said there would be no caps and he instructed Whitman to stop referring to carbon dioxide as "a pollutant."

Whitman had been publicly disgraced, much as her predecessor Carol Browner had been in 1996 when the White House publicly undermined her efforts to impose tougher smog rules. European and Japanese signatories to the Kyoto Protocols on global warming felt they'd been had. "If this was Europe, she'd have to resign," a disgusted European diplomat told the Wall Street Journal.

In defending his about-face, Bush feebly tried to lay the blame on the California power crisis. "We need more energy, more production," said Bush. "We can't have these limits at a time of rising energy prices and a serious energy shortage."

This rationale is bogus. Less than one percent of California's energy supplies come from coal or oil-burning plants that are the prime villains. And the reserve power sources, which the state is now ruthlessly tapping, run more on dead salmon (i.e., hydropower from the Columbia River system) than dirty coal.

What was surprising about Bush's carbon dioxide fiasco is that he ever blundered into the issue in the first place. The credit for that can go to Al Gore. Gore, who Bush's father dubbed the Ozone Man, set himself up as the High Priest of Global Warming. He claimed in his catastrophist tome, Earth in the Balance, that the threat was so dire that a political revolution was called for and that institutions needed to be redesigned to make environmental protection "the central organizing principle of civilization." As the most powerful VP in history (until Dick Cheney) Gore followed this up by doing next to nothing to address the problem over the next eight years. His inaction on global climate change made Gore an irresistible target for Bush campaign attacks.

It must be easy for Bush to forgive himself for breaking a promise that he never meant as more than a campaign joke in the first place. Who's going to hold him to it?

Surprise: it might be Republicans. Senators Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Maine's two senators, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, said the retreat was a mistake. Collins vowed to press forward in the Senate with legislation to place mandatory targets on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, and carbon dioxide emissions.

Martha Marks, head of Republicans for Environmental Protection, was blunt. "We're really disappointed in the president," says Marks. "We were trusting that he would live up to his campaign promise. But it seems like the wrong forces inside his administration are prevailing." It took four years to hear this kind of criticism of Clinton's numerous retreats from Democrats.

There was even grumbling inside the Bush cabinet, mainly from Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. The former chieftain of Alcoa is a global warming convert. But O'Neill's protests were drowned out by Cheney and Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's economic advisor, who, citing a Clinton era study by the Dept. of Energy, warned that sticking with the caps might cost the already frail economy billions of dollars.

Even some of Bush's oldest pals and political backers had urged him to move forward with action on carbon dioxide, most notably fellow Texan Ken Lay. Lay, a Republican loyalist with deep pockets, is the CEO of Enron, the natural gas giant and a major beneficiary of the California crisis. He had urged Bush to regulate carbon dioxide through a complex scheme of trading credits. Lay and his company had funneled $1.7 million into Republican National Committee coffers during the 2000 campaign.

With Lay--a notorious conservative who has underwritten numerous anti-environmental outfits--we come to the real power play that's at work. The debate over the CO2 emissions caps turns out to be a tussle between big coal & oil and natural gas. Limits on carbon dioxide will serve to entice utilities and other power users to move away from coal and oil toward cleaner-burning natural gas plants. Indeed one estimate by the Wall Street Journal suggests that the natural gas companies could make more than $25 billion in additional profits over the next 25 years if the carbon dioxide caps are imposed.

Ultimately, big oil and big coal prevailed in this civil war amongst the energy conglomerates and the enviros. But Bush was allowed to execute his political pirouette so easily because he enjoyed the discreet backing of three powerful Democrats: senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia and John Breaux of Louisiana, and congressman John Dingell of Michigan.

And here's the political moral for the future: the Bush crowd has learned some key survival lessons from the tenure of Bill Clinton. Namely, the art of triangulation politics: co-opt centrist Democrats and denounce the others as extremists. The new fusion politics looks a lot like the old variety.