Green America: Waking Up and Catching Up

When Jim Webb, the new Democratic senator from Virginia, replied to George Bush's state-of-the-union message, he could bear to endorse only one of the president's proposals. This was the idea of cutting America's petrol (gasoline) consumption by 20% in ten years, by increasing ethanol production to 35 billion gallons a year and raising fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

Such a plan would reduce America's dependence on imported oil from dangerous places (as would Mr Bush's plan to double the country's petroleum reserves). But it would address global warming only tangentially. The Democrats in Congress are weighing much more dramatic measures, including across-the-board cuts to the greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet. At the state level, politicians of all stripes are already taking more radical steps. Even big business is coming round. Mr Bush may be dragging his feet, but America is greening fast.

The Democrats' victory in last year's elections means that Congress's stance on environmental issues has changed dramatically. In one race for the House of Representatives, a Democratic consultant on wind power defeated a Republican ally of the oil industry. Barbara Boxer, an ardent advocate of firm action on climate change, has taken over the chairmanship of the Senate Environment Committee from James Inhofe, who often described global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".

Since Congress convened earlier this month, the Democrats have got to work fast. The House has passed a bill that would eliminate a tax break for oil production in America, and would impose penalties on firms that refuse to renegotiate the absurdly generous leases the government accidentally granted them in the late 1990s. The proceeds — perhaps $15 billion over the next decade — would be used to fund renewable energy schemes.

Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, is now turning her attention to global warming. She is setting up a committee to address both that issue, and America's dependence on imported fuel. She wants to see legislation before July 4th, so that she can declare "energy independence" on the same day that the founding fathers severed political ties with Britain.

Meanwhile, some half-dozen bills on global warming are circulating in the Senate. Several propose cap-and-trade schemes, whereby the government would create a fixed number of permits to produce greenhouse gases and then auction them or allocate them to businesses. Firms without enough permits to cover their emissions would either have to pollute less, or buy up spare ones from firms that had managed to cut back.

John McCain, a leading Republican presidential candidate, and Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic one, are behind the most prominent cap-and-trade scheme. Barack Obama, one of the Democrats' current presidential aspirants, is a co-sponsor. It is the most ambitious of the bills with serious backing: it would cut carbon emissions to 2004 levels by 2012 and then mandate further reductions of 2% a year until 2020. Although these targets are less onerous than those of the Kyoto protocol, the United Nations' treaty on climate change, most analysts reckon they will prove too exacting for Congress.

An alternative cap-and-trade scheme, sponsored by Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, suffers from the opposite problem: excessive modesty. His plan would aim to slow the growth of emissions, and ultimately stabilise them at their 2013 level by 2020. It includes a safety valve, under which the government would automatically issue more permits to pollute if the price of those permits rose too far. The economic impact would be much smaller than under the McCain-Lieberman plan but so, too, would the reductions in emissions.

Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, is proposing a third approach. She wants to create cap-and-trade mechanisms within industries rather than across the economy as a whole. She has, for instance, proposed legislation that would cut power companies' emissions by 25% of their projected levels by 2020.

All these initiatives face an uphill battle. The previous Senate rejected the McCain-Lieberman plan twice — by a bigger margin the second time around. Any bill that involves mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions would need 60 of the chamber's 100 votes to succeed, since Mr Inhofe has pledged to filibuster all such measures. In the House the Energy Committee is chaired by John Dingell, a Democrat from the carmaking hub of Detroit who has long opposed mandatory caps. Mr Dingell, who says Ms Pelosi's new committee is "as useful as feathers on a fish", will still have a big say in any legislation. And even if a bill overcomes all these obstacles, it would risk a presidential veto.

A Matter of Security
But whatever the fate of these proposals, the political climate is changing faster than the weather. Almost all the leading presidential candidates favour emissions caps. One of them, Hillary Clinton, has condemned the Bush administration's failure to act as "unAmerican". That is a remarkable change since 2000, when Al Gore toned down his environmental rhetoric during his presidential campaign for fear of sounding pious and obsessive. Indeed, activists are so convinced that the next president will be greener than Mr Bush that they are debating whether to settle for immediate but modest measures on global warming, or wait for a new administration to take bolder steps.

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