A step in the right direction on national climate policy

Sen. Maria Cantwell will hold constituent meetings this week to talk about federal climate policy in advance of a Senate vote on the Climate Security Act in June.

The U.S. stands alone among the world's advanced economies with no national climate policy. But with congressional debate under way and all three major presidential candidates committed to climate action, our shameful abdication of responsibility for solutions appears to be coming to an end. Cantwell deserves thanks for her strong leadership on energy and climate, and for inviting this dialogue.

The June vote will probably be a warm-up exercise for 2009, even if the Senate passes the bill. Despite exceptional leadership from Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, the House isn't very far along in its climate deliberations. And the president is nowhere.

So if this is a practice round for national climate policy, let's consider how far we've come and how far we have to go before game time.

The Climate Security Act includes much stronger emission-reduction commitments than the tepid bills in Congress over the past few years. It also avoids some of the more egregious loopholes that would have doomed previous bills. It's clearly a step in the right direction from the current policy of denial and inaction.

But we are getting started very late. The frequency of major floods like this winter's devastation in Southwest Washington has increased by 300 to 700 percent on every continent except Australia since the 1950s. No one of these events can be ascribed to global warming, but the trend is hardly a coincidence.

It's not too late for real climate action, but it sure isn't too early. So our first national climate policy needs to be a full-throated roar of solutions, not a soft whimper of palliatives. It must do three things well:

• Do what the science says is necessary. To avoid catastrophic climate disruption, we need to reduce climate pollution at least 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. This is not a political position; it's the objective reality of our circumstances on the planet, in the exhaustively researched opinion of our best scientists.

The Climate Security Act moves toward that reality, but it doesn't get there.

• Launch an accelerated campaign — a WWII-scale mobilization — to build a clean energy economy. We can't do what's necessary just by constraining the fossil-fuel economy. We have to replace it with an efficient clean-energy economy, with more broadly shared economic opportunity. It's a climate imperative, but with more than $50 million per day draining out of Washington state alone to import petroleum, it's also an economic and national security imperative.

The climate bill must shift this huge flow of energy capital away from the problem and toward solutions. If the bill is riddled with escape clauses and shell games, it just won't do the trick. The Climate Security Act has too many holes in it.

• Be fair. Climate disruption is deeply unjust; the poor contribute the least to the problem, but suffer disproportionately from the impacts. A sustainable future must be a more-equitable future. Fair climate policy starts with a principle articulated by Peter Barnes (www.capanddividend.org): Our atmosphere is a public trust that belongs to all of us.

Pollution rights should be auctioned, not given away, and revenues should be returned to the people either directly (as tax relief or dividends), or as public investments to speed and ease the transition to a clean-energy economy.

The Climate Security Act takes some steps in this direction, but it still includes big giveaways to polluters and fails to protect vulnerable consumers from rising fossil-fuel prices.

Our climate policy must also be simple enough to be implemented. It would be much more straightforward to limit carbon "upstream" — i.e., in the few places where it enters the economy — rather than the millions of places where it comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks.

The vote on the Climate Security Act marks an important whistle-stop on the train to real climate solutions. But we'll need to keep steaming ahead and replace the conductor-in-chief — before we arrive at a livable destination.