The relatively small, short-term politics of a huge, long-range issue: climate change

Now that the bill to fight climate change has passed the House, and debate has yet to begin in the Senate, more attention is being focused on the political ramifications of the 219-212 vote that got the bill through the first chamber. Carl Hulse of The New York Times notes that the House passed an energy tax for a new Democratic president in 1993 by a 219-213 vote, "only to see it ignored by the Senate and seized as a campaign issue by Republicans, who took control of the House the next year." There was fear among Democrats; of the 44 who voted against the bill, 29 represent districts carried by Republican Sen. John McCain in November, notes Greg Giroux of CQPolitics.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican national chairman who just succeeded scandalized South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, told a party dinner in Iowa that the climnate bill violates what he says was President Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on families making $250,000 or less a year. “I did not know that everybody who had a lightswitch at their house made more than $250,000,” Barbour said, according to Doug Burns in the Daily Yonder.

"Leading Democrats say they are more than happy to have the energy bill serve as a signature issue. They say it represents a transformative moment — their party’s effort to take on a genuine threat to the planet," Hulse reports. "They say voters will appreciate the legislation as an overdue effort to lessen the nation’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil while creating millions of new jobs in the production and distribution of cleaner energy and in energy conservation technology."

A poll for The Washington Post and ABC News June 18-21 found that "Three-quarters of Americans think the federal government should regulate the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases from power plants, cars and factories to reduce global warming," Steven Mufson and Jennifer Agiesta report for the Post. But when asked if they favor the "cap and trade" system in the climate bill, 52 percent said they did and 42 percent did not. "Although 62 percent of those surveyed said they would support regulation even if it raised the price of purchases, and 56 percent would back cap and trade if it resulted in a $10 increase in utility costs, 44 percent said they would back a cap-and-trade system if it boosted monthly electricity bills by $25." (Read more) For the full poll results, click here.

Rural Republicans argue that the bill will have a disporportionate effect in rural areas, and most farm groups oppose the bill, but Post columnist Steven Pearlstein says that is short-sighted. "With the possible exception of the ski industry, it's hard to think of any sector of the economy that will be hit harder by global warming than agriculture," he wrote Friday, noting that agriculture is "the one major source" of greenhouse gases that the bill doesn't cover, but farmers demanded to be compensated for trapping carbon with alternative farming practices, to have the Agriculture Department handle the process, and to protect the "ethanol boondoggle." And even when they got that, very few groups endorsed the bill. "The next time the world's most selfish lobby comes to Washington demanding drought relief," Pearlstein writes, "someone ought to have the good sense to tell them to go pound sand." (Read more)