Why Climate Change Legislation Hits a Wall in Washington D.C.
From The Observatory
Source: The Observatory
Decades of political battles, shifting public opinion, and evolving advocacy strategies shaped the path of U.S. climate policy from early scientific warnings to major federal investment.
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This adapted excerpt is from Chelsea Henderson’s Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics (2024, Turner Publishing Company). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from [Name of Publisher]. It was adapted and produced for the web by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
“Why Climate Change Legislation Hits a Wall in Washington D.C.” by Chelsea Henderson is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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On February 8, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson inadvertently made history—but not the kind that would be noted in textbooks. “Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places,” President Johnson said in a Special Message to Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty, delivered mere weeks after his 1965 inauguration. “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, LBJ—in the 1960s, before words like global warming or climate change were commonplace vernacular—was the first commander-in-chief to warn his fellow Americans of a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
Culturally, in the post–World War II era marked by the advent of disposable everything and a stark turn away from the rationing imposed by generations prior, Americans weren’t yet tuned in to eco-friendly tasks such as throwing garbage into a trash receptacle or curbing industrial pollution. LBJ started to change that, but sadly, the first U.S. president to be briefed by scientists on the dire threats posed by climate change wouldn’t be the last. Not even close.
The Global Change Research Act
Fritz Hollings was fascinated by the weather and the ocean. The Democratic senator from South Carolina, elected to the Senate in 1966, was a believer in “practical conservationism.” In the early 1970s, the World War II veteran and lawyer—with a Southern accent so thick, one of his colleagues used to joke he was the only senator who needed his own interpreter—was a driving force behind early environmental policies protecting the ocean, including the National Coastal Zone Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Ocean Dumping Act, and the Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Hollings channeled his dual interests of weather and ocean to help President Nixon establish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency housed in the Department of Commerce that brought the first of America’s physical science–focused agencies together under one umbrella in order to consolidate the federal government’s research efforts in the field of oceanic resource management.
NOAA, with its focus on oceans and the atmosphere, is home to most of the climate science conducted by the federal government. The agency remains an employer to many groundbreaking climate scientists, including those now known for testifying before Congress on the perils of climate change.
Charged by the advancement of new satellite technology and supercomputers, believing they held the promise to collect data and offer a more sophisticated understanding of the greenhouse effect and its impacts, a group of leading scientists assembled a proposal to establish a U.S. Global Change Research Program, which President Bush subsequently used his presidential authority to create in 1989. Encompassing thirteen federal agencies, the Program, which exists today, seeks to understand global warming and the changes it’s causing the Earth.
Congress codified the Program—so that a future president could not disassemble the effort without an act of law—one year later, under the leadership of Senator Hollings, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, which had jurisdiction over the bill. The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed by both the House and the Senate unanimously, and President Bush signed the measure into law the day after he signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Though Hollings is not a name typically synonymous with global warming legislation, the bill solidified his climate legacy—and that of President Bush.
A nine-page research bill that passed with barely any debate and no opposition might sound like it wasn’t important. But the Global Change Research Act was and still is critical. By permanently creating the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the government has a body to coordinate global warming research across the federal agencies. But most vitally, one of the mandates in the law requires that, every four years, the Program send to the president and Congress an assessment of its findings on the effects of global change and on current and major long-term trends in global change. By 2023, five National Climate Assessments have been issued (federal agencies sometimes fall behind schedule), and this ongoing assessment of the science and the risks transcends political party.
As EPA administrator Reilly noted, Bush was “committed to [a] very substantial research budget to [make] major investments by NASA on upper atmospheric ozone monitoring and on climate monitoring. NOAA was well-funded.”
However, despite these initial investments and early efforts, for some environmental activists, the government was not moving nearly fast enough to address global warming.
International Climate Talks Heat Up
The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 established a process for regularly scheduled international meetings to negotiate future treaties in support of the overarching goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” In 1995, in accordance with the terms of the Rio Agreement, the first “Conference of the Parties” (COP) was held in Berlin, where agreement was reached on an outline of emissions reductions. The Berlin Mandate established a process for governments to set specific, legally binding targets and timetables to reduce developed-country emissions of greenhouse gases. Wealthy nations like the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Japan, which had been responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions and thus were responsible for the brunt of the threats posed by climate change—threats not exclusive to the countries that generated the pollution—would take on more burden and cost for making future reductions
“We know that man-made emissions have increased the concentration by about 30 percent, from 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to around 366 ppm today. We know that the industrialized countries have put most of the carbon into the atmosphere, and that CO2 lingers there for 100 to 150 years. We know that the United States is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases; we have 4 percent of the world’s population and contribute 22 percent of the carbon,” former senator Tim Wirth, serving as Undersecretary for Global Affairs, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in the summer of 1997. “If the developed countries, with our current economic capacity, technical capability, and energy-intensive lifestyle, don’t go first—setting the example and reducing emissions—then developing countries will not act either. We must lead the way. And we must move soon. If not, a doubling of concentrations becomes certain, and we put ourselves on the road to a tripling or even higher levels of concentrations—the consequences of which are uncertain but likely to be catastrophic.”
International talks were critical to future global progress, especially with domestic climate action stymied by Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress for the last six years of Clinton and Gore’s two terms in office. These negotiations, led by Wirth, were laying the groundwork for a climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, named for Kyoto, Japan, where the 1997 COP was scheduled to take place. (Like the Montreal Protocol, international climate agreements conducted under the U.N. Framework bear the name of the host city for the COP where they were agreed to, with the host nation rotating each year.)
After the stunning and heartbreaking inability to pass climate legislation in the 2009–2010 congressional session, when Democrats enjoyed strong majorities in both chambers, and Obama presided over the White House, strategists for funding and planning climate action realized they needed a new Playbook.
The key takeaways from the postmortem were hard to swallow.
The environmental movement lacked the political influence to pass a climate change bill, especially at a time when the economy was struggling, and President Obama’s administration had been reluctant to use the words “climate change.” Americans were not taking the climate threat seriously; only 34 percent of the populace believed that global warming was caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and a scant 32 percent thought it was a serious problem. Even some staunch environmental allies feared that voting for climate change legislation carried the risk of being BTU’d. Arguments to protect the economy would always beat out the urgency to curb carbon emissions, especially if curbing those emissions meant reducing fossil fuel use. Big Oil was a rich, formidable, and politically powerful foe—one that also donated to Democratic lawmakers.
This near-constant tug between doing what was right for the environment and doing what was right for the economy at times drove environmental groups to “attack their friends” when those eco-friendly lawmakers had to sacrifice environmental policy, as happened numerous times over several decades.
What the environmental community needed was to make climate change so important that local, state, and federal lawmakers would not be willing to sacrifice related policies because supporting environmental measures would be a winning position.
Advocates Show Off New Muscles
The environmental community, as individuals, could threaten to vote against lawmakers who did not do their bidding, but such threats fell hollow compared to the oil and gas industry's campaign largesse. “We had a fundamental lack of political power,” noted Kathleen Welch, who led strategies for philanthropic and political investments in climate action. She was determined to help build that capacity, no matter how long it took.
Over the course of twelve long years, from 2010 to 2022, the environmental community had, year by year, election by election, vote by vote, learned to course-correct. The overwhelming electoral victories for clean energy at the state level in 2016, 2017, and 2018 built on investments in philanthropy and efforts to create authentic coalitions to depolarize clean energy. That, plus victories at the federal level in 2018 and 2020, were just the start of their flex. Climate action and adjacent clean energy policy were, indeed, proving to be a winning strategy.
But in the 2021–2022 legislative session, the stakes were high. They had a short window to make climate change the top priority, amid a global pandemic and a global recession.
They could not stomach seeing climate change set aside in favor of other priorities.
Passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)
The Inflation Reduction Act’s $369 billion in climate and climate-adjacent funding would make it the single biggest investment in solving the issue in U.S. history. But most remarkable: even when the going got tough, even when inflation
refused to abate, even when Manchin publicly pushed back so many times, these provisions did not end up on the cutting-room floor. The Senate passed the measure 51 to 50 on August 7, 2022. The House passed it five days later, 220 to 207. For once, policy addressing climate change prevailed, miraculously in the face of staggering inflation rates and a tricky partisan divide.
What made it possible for the much-needed legislation to occur this time around? How did the environmental community succeed in protecting their priorities, whereas in years past they had failed to do so? Looking back, a number of key components aligned and coalesced to yield the successful result, including: the building of authentic grassroots support; creating a more diverse and inclusive movement that included labor unions, youth groups, environmental justice advocates, and clean energy businesses; and implementing more sophisticated tactics and policy alignment.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It took knocking on more than half a million doors in key target areas, calling those lawmakers’ offices, and collecting a petition with 600,000 signatures. By engaging small businesses in key districts, many of whom put signs in their windows proclaiming support for clean energy and climate policies, they got their messaging directly into the places lawmakers frequent when home.
Along the way, they staged 3,600 climate-focused events, making climate action the candidate, one that had to win at any cost. Their advocacy made Biden eager to assume the mantle of the climate change president; finally, a commander-in-chief who connected climate change action to both job creation and winning in the voting booth. A “decade of intentional strategy, investment, and hard work helped us get Biden elected and helped us get the IRA bill done.”
A Meaningful Commitment to Address Climate Change
Like anyone looking to avoid spam, Kathleen Welch never answers phone calls if she does not recognize the number on the screen. The same held true on August 12, 2022, when, after hours of working outside the U.S. Capitol, grabbing members of Congress on their way to vote on the painstakingly negotiated Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to cheer on their support for final passage, she and her peers took a much-needed and deserved lunch break.
She ignored the unknown caller and continued with her lunch.
Soon her phone dinged with a voicemail alert. Deciding to give it a listen, she got the shock of her life: President Joe Biden had called to thank her for her hard work to get the IRA over the finish line. He left her his cell number and asked her to call back. “You have to call him back,” her friends prodded, something she was reluctant to do at first. But eventually, after much intense lobbying from her lunchmates, she relented and called back the phone number left by the President of the United States. Once connected, he was able to tell her personally how thankful he was for her vision to revamp the way the environmental community did business and her steadfast determination to see climate legislation passed.
“It was one of the best days of my life,” she said, still gushing well after the ink on the bill was dry. “That and, of course, my wedding day.” And she had cause to celebrate.
The Inflation Reduction Act promised to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It planned to do so not by capping carbon, as past bills had, but by incentivizing clean energy. The 730-page bill included the program for reducing methane emissions that Carper spearheaded and persuaded Manchin to support. In addition, IRA had over $100 billion in tax incentives and rebates for consumers to purchase EVs and electrify households; $2.6 billion for much-needed coastal resilience; $21 billion for U.S. farmers and rural communities to reduce emissions and make the food supply more resilient in the face of climate change. Also included was an unprecedented $60 billion for environmental justice, in part to help underserved communities transition to an equitable, net-zero economy and boost job opportunities in the energy sector. Together with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the climate benefits were enormous. But striking, still, is that the climate provisions survived at all.
After nearly sixty years of briefings, thousands of hearings in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, hundreds of thousands of pages of bill text, decades of fighting the merchants of doubt, billions of dollars in campaigns for and against action, uncountable sleepless nights, and a few close calls, the United States finally inked into law a meaningful commitment to address climate change.
