Congress, climate change and incompetent grandstanding
MY COLLEAGUES have been discussing climate change, and it's worth noting that global warming used to be the subject of genuine political debate in Washington as well. Al Gore made a movie about it. Barack Obama vowed to put a stop to it (indeed, he claimed that he had begun to lower sea levels simply by being nominated for the presidency). Congress pored over a series of detailed laws designed to tackle it. The House of Representatives even passed one. No longer. The bill the House passed made no headway in the Senate, even with a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. Now that the Democrats have lost the House and seen their majority shrink in the Senate, the chances of an emissions-cutting measure getting through Congress are nil. Indeed, Republicans want to move in the opposite direction, and strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But the chances of that succeeding are also close to zero, since the president has promised to veto any such move. It should be of little surprise, then, that the hearing held today by the House's Energy and Commerce Committee on reining in the EPA was more about grandstanding than about legislating. A series of Republicans asked Lisa Jackson (pictured), the head of the EPA, whether she was aware of how many jobs she was killing by raising energy prices and whether she was happy about it. A series of Democrats asked Mrs Jackson whether she was aware of how many lives she was saving by fighting pollution, and whether it would be a good idea to let those people die. Mrs Jackson, the supposed star witness, had only a minor role in it all. Committee hearings are always like this. After smarmy exchanges about how delighted they are to be speaking to one another, congressmen ask grotesquely biased Gotcha! questions that the witnesses, usually harried officials, do their best not to respond to in a meaningful fashion. There are a lot of requests, almost always ignored, for yes or no answers. Mrs Jackson, for example, expended considerable time and effort not saying that greenhouse-gas regulation would raise energy prices and thus harm the economy. Sometimes, the pretence of give-and-take is abandoned altogether. This morning, Joe Sorry BP Barton, a Republican from Texas, asked a laughably leading question, requested a yes or no answer, and thenbefore receiving onetold Mrs Jackson, The answer is no. When she asked, with faux naivety, whether Mr Barton wanted her to answer the question herself or comment on his remarks, he replied with admirable honesty that he didn't. What was surprising, given how long Congress has debated this subject, is how incompetent the grandstanding was. I'm reconciled to the fact that America's congressmen are not all silver-tongued Ciceros. Indeed, most of them seem to have trouble following a train of thought, finishing a sentence or getting noun and verb to agree. Several appeared not to know that the heinous acts they were complaining about were committed not by Mrs Jackson and her staff, but by the courts, or by the administration of George W. Bush. One confused cap-and-trade schemes to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions with the more rigid administrative approach used by the EPA, giving Mrs Jackson a let-out from an otherwise awkward question. Another did not seem to know that Congress had the power to overturn executive regulations. A third proudly declared the he was an engineer, and so knew a thing or two about science, only to have Mrs Jackson retort that she too was an engineer (oops!), and so knew the importance of deferring to experts in a given field. A fourth made a fart joke, and then proudly declared, That's humour! But in addition to garbled syntax, muddled arguments and childish behaviour, the Republican attack-dogs were surprisingly off-message (the Democrats shared all these faults too, but this wasn't their show). Some argued that global warming wasn't proven, others that the EPA was misinterpreting the Clean Air Act (something the Supreme Court has cleared it of) and yet others that all the EPA's efforts to control pollution of any sort since its creation in 1970 had placed an intolerable burden on business. A representative from Oregon starting banging on about the treatment of wood-based biomass in a bill that has already been shelved. Another Republican seemed to be arguing that the EPA should adopt more stringent regulations than it has proposednot a popular idea within the party. Amid all this confusion, the Republicans' best argumentthat the costs of regulating greenhouse gases are likely to outweigh the benefits in the short term, at leastgot lost. The White House is said to be contemplating postponing the EPA's regulatory drive until after next year's election, for fear that the Republicans will denounce it as job-killing on the campaign trail. And so, doubtless, they will. But if today's hearing is anything to go by, they are also likely to sully that message with a lot of extremeand extremely pueriletalk. (Photo credit: Bloomberg News)