As the struggle over Senate energy legislation, the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act, is getting ready to heat up, the Environmental Defense Action Fund has prepared  ads targeting, among others, Missouri’s Kit Bond:

However, even if everyone who sees the ad contacts Bond and implores him to support the legislation, I doubt that it would have much effect. Bond has already made it clear that he’s glad that he’s had his chance to dance, and he’s just as willing as ever to pay the Big Oil and King Coal pipers (who have supported him to the tune of $446,000 over his career).

In fact, Bond has already stepped up and taken a leadership role in the Republican fight against clean energy legislation. He and his partner in crime, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), dusted off and reissued as new last October’s widely disputed “report” in which they attempted to present clean energy legislation as a “$3.6 trillion gas tax.” Needless to say, this new iteration of the same ole, same ole was just as quickly and easily discredited as it was last fall. A spokesperson for Senator John Kerry responded to Bond’s and Hutchison’s latest effort to cast clean energy legislation as an “energy tax” with the following comment:

The only thing Senator Bond and Senator Hutchison have to worry about today is if we start taxing bad math and misinformation, because it could cost them billions.

Actually, the American Power Act proposes relief and refund programs that would mitigate the impact of nearly 69 percent of the carbon fees it would impose. Numerous studies show that the legislation would cost relatively little – for instance, according to EPA modeling results, it would add between $80 to $150 a year to the average household budget. As Senator Lieberman put it:

“There’ll be some people who will want to demagogue that politically, but that’s less than $1 a day,” Lieberman told reporters. “Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment? I think the answer is going to be yes.”

Ah yes, demagoguery. And, of course, Senator Lieberman ought to remember that “yes” has little currency with members of the Party of No – who, oddly enough, used to really like the idea of cap-and-trade – back when they thought Democrats would never go for it.

The BP oil spill puts Republicans in a real bind. Speaking of Rep. Barton’s (R-TX) apology to BP, Josh Marshall at TPM puts their dilemma into context beautifully:

… Dems take lots of oil money too. But while Dems have one night stands with the oil industry or relationships, with Republicans like Barton it’s a committed and loving relationship. Even when it’s not even helpful.

Locally, nobody exemplifies the GOP love affair with Big Oil better than Roy Blunt, who has been twisting and turning with the best of them as he tries to talk tough while getting his oil industry cronies off the hook. We noted earlier how quick he was to jump on the GOP “drill, baby,drill” effort to portray the moratorium on offshore drilling as as a greater catastrophe than the spill. However, he has branched out and is now, according to Fired Up Missouri, creating a genuinely twisted narrative in order to oppose the spill-inspired resurgence of clean-energy legislation. Yesterday morning – I swear to God – on Jamie Allman’s  KSDK radio show, he made the claim that clean-energy legislation is bad for the environment:

Cap and trade is a terrible thing for our state, it’s a terrible thing for the country, and it’s a terrible thing for the environment.  Because when we lose the jobs, those jobs go to somewhere that cares a whole lot less about what comes out of the smokestack than we do. And you know, America is a lot of great things, but it’s not, it’s not, it’s not, it’s not a planet. So we can’t solve this problem ourselves.

There is so much wrong with this assertion that one hardly knows where to start. However, what I’m really interested in here are Blunt’s errors of fact, which bring us to his assertions about jobs. Blunt knows as well as most of us that big swaths of our jobs went overseas long ago, even before the recession, and, if they continue to move off-shore, it will not be because of federal energy legislation. To find the culprit look no farther than misguided dedication to a one-sided, utopian concept of free-trade. Former Senator Fritz Hollings summed it up in a Huffington Post interview:

 

An important part of the job fraud is to make the people feel like the loss of jobs is due to the recession, not off-shoring. Long before the recession, South Carolina lost its textile industry; North Carolina lost its furniture industry; Detroit its automobile industry, and California its computer industry, etc. President Obama wants to increase exports, but we have nothing to export. … Most of the job loss is from off-shoring, not the recession.

Roy Blunt was playing a leadership role in Washington during the eight years of the Bush administration during which the off-shoring of our manufacturing jobs continued to  accelerate, and I can’t remember that he got too hot and bothered about job loss then. Senator Hollings outlined several possible correctives – simple measures like canceling tax exemptions on off-shore profits for instance. But I don’t remember Roy Blunt even discussing off-shoring as a problem. One can’t be blamed for asking what exactly has changed.

This question is particularly salient since there are many convincing arguments that clean energy legislation will create jobs. Even ConservaDem Claire McCaskill understands this fact, which is why she recently signed on to a letter affirming the importance of moving forward on the green jobs front.

I don’t know about you, but before my leaders decide we can’t afford to address a potentially catastrophic climate-change crisis because jobs might go overseas, I expect them to at least discuss alternatives like those suggested by Hollings. Before we decide that clean energy legislation will hurt our job situation, I want to hear Blunt make a serious intellectual effort to justify his evident belief that green energy jobs aren’t good enough.

On one point, I do agree with Blunt – the U.S. is not a planet.  It is precisely because the U.S. aspires to a leadership role in a shared world that it behooves us to be among the first to act. Blunt, was more than willing to go along unquestioningly with the assertion that the U.S. should, as a world leader, bring “freedom” to the Middle East. Why then is he opposed to exercising U.S. leadership to combat potentially catastrophic climate change? What reason could he possibly have – apart from the fact that he might suffer personally  if he supports anything that threatens the profits of his big oil paramour.

Via The Wonk Room, Claire McCaskil is a charter memeber of a new Senate group which has coalesced around energy policy:

These “Brown Dog” senators – [Sherrod] Brown , Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Carl Levin (D-MI), Robert Casey Jr. (D-PA), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Mark Warner (D-VA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Robert Byrd (D-WV) – have been among the most skeptical of Democrats about climate legislation, raising spurious concerns that limits on coal and oil pollution would harm their states’ economies. They finally appear to have turned the corner, recognizing that being shackled to the dirty fuels of the past is the true threat to the future of American manufacturing jobs.

The members of the group sent a letter  to Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham which emphasizes the need to retool American manufacturing while cushioning the transition to mitigate economic pain. The letter emphasizes the importance of taking a  leadership role in the global clean energy economy.

It seems that the light may have come on for McCaskill and she can finally see that clean energy is a potential winner, both politically and in terms of what it will do for Missouri’s future economic growth. If this new initiative is what it seems – and the letter handles the topic of carbon emissions in a somewhat ginger fashion – we will need to let McCaskill know that we have noticed and applaud her first steps away from endorsing the bad, old coal-powered energy model.

This site has been known to criticize Claire McCaskill–twice in two days last week, in fact (Uh, Claire, you got to dance with them what brung you and Claire never fails to disappoint, does she?). We take no joy in attacking one of our own. We’d so much rather be able to praise her. So herewith are some words of commendation from a progressive who has worked with her and her team. Andy Levine of RepoWEr America talked to me about Claire’s attitude toward the upcoming clean energy legislation:

hotflash: Tell me what you know about Claire McCaskill’s attitude toward the energy bill.

Andy Levine: (inaudible) a kind of studied neutrality about it. It’s what you’d expect out of Senator McCaskill. She is, uh, she’s sharp. She’s gonna want to really get into the issue in a detailed kind of way and know what’s going on on all fronts. They’ve had some concerns they’ve talked about before in costs and jobs. And a lot of those we kinda feel have been allayed, or at least we’ve been able to have good dialogue. And they’ve been able to see that the bill is or at least the frameworks for the bill aren’t gonna do those, the worst case damages that they’ve heard about from the other side.

One of the more recent concerns that she’s talked about has been with the creation of an entirely new financial market, which, you know, there would be under cap and trade that’d create a new market for trading carbon permits back and forth. To me, that signals that she’s ready to engage. You know, when she starts putting the auditor hat back on, that typically means that she really is going to get into an issue, she’s thinking about it in the way that she thinks about things, and hopefully it means that she’s gonna be a participant and make this a better bill and help pass it.  

hotflash: And what is she afraid of as far as the market, in the market?

Levine: Well, you know, I think one of the things you do have to watch in creating a cap and trade system is making sure that you’re not adding a whole new set of unregulated ways for people to trade back and forth with these permits instead of buying and selling the permits. She wants to make sure that that doesn’t turn into, you know, similar to, something similar to the energy markets in the early 2000s where you had Enron running blackouts. And, you know, she wants to make sure it doesn’t turn into derivatives. So, you know, to me it’s, it’s constructive criticism. It’s not a sink-the-bill criticism.

hotflash: What do you think about her criticism from last summer–I think it was last summer–about not wanting to put ourselves at a disadvantage with countries like India and China, if they’re not …

Levine: Well, you know, I think Copenhagen has gone a long way to address that. I think that we’ve seen the developing world really want to engage on this. And, you know, for whatever part everybody played, at the end of the day an agreement came out of that conference. And, I think, what she’s seen also is that this bill has the kind of components to it that are not going to put American jobs at risk, that are in fact going to create new jobs in this country. You know, the efficiency provisions that are in this bill and job creation provisions that are in this bill really make it a win/win for us and are not gonna, you know, they’re not gonna put people at risk. And we’re not gonna see big, you know, increases in our energy costs and we’re not gonna see the kind of doom and gloom scenarios that the Republicans and frankly some of the bigger energy companies have been pushing on this. So, you know, she’s seen that. She’s had the chance to  see through some of those, you know, red herrings. And I think now that she’s seen that this is a good framework, that it is a good, you know, a good bill that is being crafted, you know I think that if she can get in and do some work on the fiscal end of it, then she’s gonna be a part of the team and help move it forward. But that’s our hope, that’s our hope.

hotflash: I certainly hope so. Yeah, yeah.

Levine: She’s certainly been an honest broker the whole time with us, though. She’s given both sides the time of day. And I feel like, you know, they’ve been utterly fair with everybody and, you know, upfront with their concerns. As long as they keep acting, you know, in that kind of a manner, I feel like it’s gonna move forward in the right way and hopefully get her on the team.

hotflash: Okay. Just fill me in a little bit, if you wouldn’t mind, about your remark that after Copenhagen that concern about the jobs issue as far as China …

Levine: Well, it’s not even just that. I mean, first of all you had, you know, the concern last summer was that China and India aren’t gonna engage, they’re not gonna be part of the process, and we’re gonna take this big step and then nobody else is gonna take the step with us. Well, we’ve seen that to be incorrect. I mean, even in the months leading up to Copenhagen, the Indians were lobbying hard to get a bill moving, to get the United States participating in this. The (inaudible) foreign minister told Senator Clinton, Secretary Clinton, pardon me, that they want the Americans to lead. They want us to lead and, you know, we take a step, they’ll take a step with us. And the Chinese engaged heavily at Copenhagen. Now, they, you know, they shaped the process to meet some of their own domestic goals, but at the end of the day you had an agreement that had to come out with the United States and China on board, for anything to happen. And I think when you look at that, when you also look at the provisions that are in this bill already, some of the language being used to talk about, you know, protections for certain domestic industries, you know, you look at some of the efficiency targets that are in there and some of the job growth potential, I think she’s starting to see that this is not going to be a big, you know, punishment to American industry. But, in fact, it’s going to be a way to help American industry modernize and hopefully stay more competitive globally than we would have without it.

hotflash: Thanks, Andy.

Levine: Yep.