Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
A Bit of Advice on Waxman-Markey: Beware the Lobbyists
This advice doesn't come from me personally, I am only passing it on from a lead official within the German Emissions Trading Authority, the American counterpart of which is still a gleam in the eyes of Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, and supporters of their proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 now slowly taking shape in Congress.
He made clear that his advice comes from experience, expressing the hope that the Americans, who need to get up to speed quickly, could learn from the German's first stumbles initiating their own cap and trade program, as was Germany's first-round of emissions trading (Germany's first round of trading, the "learning by doing phase", lasted from 2005 to 2007. The second round of trading, the "stabilization and refinement phase" is in place until 2012.)
The advice? Beware the lobbyists and the excessive pressure they exert on the process.
"Early cap and trade [proposals] receive enormous lobby'" Dr. Enno Harders told our international group of journalists and bloggers earlier this month while visiting the offices of the German Trading Authority. Dr. Harders emphasized the need for legislators to exercise leadership and steel themselves with the political will to "resist the excessive lobby pressure that makes initial cap and trade ineffective."
The concerns expressed by the more experienced Germans follow closely with the concerns of the "Green Big Guns" outlined yesterday in David Levitan's excellent post.
And it is a well-placed concern. A recent report in the Guardian shows a 50% increase in lobbying efforts from the oil, gas, and coal in the first three months of this year, spending up to $45 million to pressure lawmakers to shut down support for president Obama's efforts to enact clean energy and climate legislation. "The pressure is enourmous," says environmental reporter Suzanne Goldenberg, from an advertising barage to money funneled into the coffers of key legislatures, the heat, as it were, is on.
Though Goldenberg reports that supporters of the Waxman-Markey bill are spending more money than ever before to counter this pressure, it is but a "drop in the bucket" in comparison with the resources available to the mamoth fossil energy industry.
The whole world is watching the process unfold and fear that America will fail once again to take a leadership role in building a new, low carbon energy economy.
And so it comes down to the pleas from expert observers like Dr. Harders for legislators to exhibit, perhaps as never before, political will - and do it in the face of enormous pressure to continue with the short-sighted, vested interest for business as usual. For some at the risk of their own political career. Sometimes that's what it takes to do the right thing.
We need heroes in Congress.
- Posted in
10 Comments so far
Show AllCongress should SHUT UP and listen to RON PAUL ! At least he's doing the right thing of trying once again to pass the HEMP FARMING ACT to legalize INDUSTRIAL HEMP which will go towards fuel and manufacturing needs and is even carbon neutral and sometimes carbon negative. Unfortunately, it has the same chance of passing as does single payer healthcare and that makes me VERY VERY ANGRY ! ACES even in its original form is nothing but more big government and giveaway to the corporate polluters and I expect the watered down version to be even worse. "Cap and trade" is just another scam designed to benefit Wall Street all the while costing the taxpayers more money.
HEMP HEMP HOORAY ! Sorry max, but we "progressives" and "liberals" are too stupid to pick up on hemp for fuel. We'd much rather listen to Rush Limbaughand George Monbiot lying about all biofuels being bad. And single payer? Forget that too. You need 3rd parties to get even a stinkin chance of them passing?
Yeah, that's true. Still, I'm sure that there are liberals and progressives willing to think differently from most of the ones who are harebrained versions here.
Heroes seem to be in short supply on Capitol Hill. I can name two: Ron Paul with whom I have considerable disagreement on policy and 100% agreement on integrity and Dennis Kucinich.
I can see we would have been better off with Paul as President than Obama who has been pretty consistently disappointing me. What I hold against him is that he is reversing his campaign promises. That is, he lied. My expectations of him were not overly high, but I didn't think he was going to lie. I was wrong.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Two choices for politicos: a failed career or a short lived one. Most choose the failed because it's easier softer and financially satisfying.
Sioux Rose
The pressure may be enormous from oil, gas and coal interests, but wait till they see (and experience) the pressure mustered by Gaia, a/k/a Earth Mother. Long-accustomed to stealing nature's resources while failing to recognize the price of burning eons of organic fuels in the relative blink of an eye, true costs are yet to be extracted for this senseless holocaust against the natural world. So much has been destroyed for so little. The lasting sacrificed for the transitory, the sustainable for the toxic. Wisdom is in short supply when only paper profits matter.
Mother Earth will only punish us by simply not giving us any more resources after the last drop is gone. There are replacements such as solar, wind, biofuels aside from corn based ones, tidal, and geothermal but right now there are no funding plans for those technologies and we would need rising prices in fossil fuels to see the light of day on those alternative renewables. We can't even get progressives off fosil fuels let alone conservatives and libertarians.
""The pressure is enourmous," says environmental reporter Suzanne Goldenberg, from an advertising barage to money funneled into the coffers of key legislatures, the heat, as it were, is on."
It's time we stop using words like "pressure" and just call it "bribery".
PEOPLE, lobbyists, politicians
Thus should the hierarchy be because even lobbyists have more class than politicians because they go to the politicians for power in a straightforward manner and right out in the open and no shame
The people should be at the forefront for the premise of a functioning democracy; it seems that this should be the case and yet it has been that the people start at a zero position in in their desire to get redress or a matter before politicians that would be just and right for all the peoples in the US of A and the world too.
Lobbyists have the advantage in starting any matter they wish before the politicians at the other end of the scale with 100% because the politicians cannot see past their greed and all the green possessed by said lobbyists and all the people have are petitions, letters, demonstrations and all they get from politicians is a machine answer and might get to 50% of attention from said pols and which is considered by them a sacrifice for the people and lobbyists have never been the same.
Lobbyists can work for business, other governments, and any other entity that has money and it has been shown that politicians and lobbyists start any process or procedure that might affect the bottom line of any client of a lobbyist the pols and lobbyists start dead even at 100% and the people at zero which is why the clients get pretty much what they want and we the people end up in the loo.
Tony 5/16/2009
Lobbying is sedition.