Cap and Trade: Are Environmentalists to Blame For Its Failure in Congress?

Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol has written a post mortem on the cap and trade legislation that failed to pass Congress during Barack Obama’s first term. Accordingly, she recounts the environmental groups expected that serious cap and trade measures could become reality with Obama as President and a Congress that had enough legislators sympathetic to making climate legislation.

            But in her research paper, to be presented at a Harvard forum in February, Skocpol argues that the environmental organizations pushing for the legislation were caught off guard by the extreme GOP stance to their cause in Congress and were left flat footed by the emergence of the Tea Party.

            She compares the failure of cap and trade with the success of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, saying that health care reformers had experienced failure in the past and were willing to correct their strategies, whereas environmental organizations had experienced success—notably the passage of acid rain legislation under the first Bush presidency—and “eagerly anticipated building upon an earlier triumph during another political opening with a sympathetic president and woo-able legislators in both parties.”

            Knowing that Democratic members of Congress from coal and oil producing states would oppose cap and trade, the environmentalists’ plan was to lobby GOP legislators, as they had done in the past, hoping to pull enough of them away from their party’s stance to get the majority they needed.

            That did not happen. The environmentalists goofed. That’s at least how Skocpol surmises the situation.

            I believe that Skocpol is correct in her assessment that environmental groups did not fully anticipate the iron-fisted opposition by the GOP to their cause. And no one could have foreseen the rise of the Tea Party, which sprang up almost like a political deus ex machina and provided the grassroots (at least Astroturf) backing to the GOP/right wing/big business agenda.

            True the Affordable Care Act passed, but just barely. The Senate narrowly averted a filibuster on the bill. The legislation passed the House 219 to 212, with 34 of the no votes coming from Democrats. Had five more Democrats voted against the legislation, its fate would have been the same as cap and trade. The thing to remember is that the legislation received no GOP votes either in the House or in the Senate. No GOP votes. None. Nada.

            The way the press is characterizing Skocpol’s paper is that she is laying blame at the feet of the environmental organizations that worked on passing cap and trade, that they got the political landscape completely wrong. What she says has merit. And she is absolutely correct that environmental organizations need to work harder at engaging the larger public. On the other hand, can environmentalists be fully to blame when they are confronted with a party that has completely lost its collective mind? Can you point the finger at the National Resources Defense Council when Senator Inhofe argues against climate science with quotes from the bible? Is the Sierra Club the bad guy when the GOP fails to act with the barest minimum of responsibility?