WP: Climate Policy's Odd Man Out
Debate Is Fast Passing Bush By
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, January 22, 2007; Page A19
Last week the administration embarrassed itself on climate change, and today will be excruciating. A confluence of forces -- the Democratic takeover of Congress, freak winter weather, Al Gore's documentary on global warming -- has conspired to create an exciting moment in the climate debate. But the Bush team seems determined to be a wallflower, and to step on its own toes as it watches....This morning, on the eve of the president's State of the Union speech, an all-star team of chief executives is descending on Washington to make the case for a comprehensive climate approach built around a cap-and-trade system. The team includes four large power utilities as well as the chemical company DuPont; the aluminum giant Alcoa and the oil major BP. Naturally it features General Electric, the leading industrial cheerleader for climate regulation.
The CEOs' visit raises awkward questions for the Bush administration. Team Bush appears to believe that a cap-and-trade system would burden business, but business leaders are saying they want cap-and-trade enacted....But the biggest embarrassment in the CEOs' visit concerns the extraordinary timing. Ordinarily, lobbyists aiming to influence the president's agenda do not seek to upstage him the day before his State of the Union address....So what happened on this occasion? The chief executives are in Washington today because they aren't even trying to influence the White House. As they planned their visit over the past weeks, they were barely in touch with the Bush team because they assumed Bush to be irrelevant....Eight months ago, when Gore's climate documentary was released, this state of affairs was inconceivable. Not only was Bush still a player, the case for climate change was widely doubted. Chortling climate-deniers, expecting an easy propaganda victory over the man whose energy-tax proposal they killed in 1993, greeted Gore's movie with glee. A group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute put out two TV commercials asserting that climate science is inconclusive. A House Republican hearing ridiculed a graph that features prominently in Gore's movie showing the world's temperature puttering along in a steady state before shooting upward like the handle of a hockey stick.
But this time around, Gore has proved a tougher adversary. His movie has grossed an astonishing $24 million, not counting foreign sales; the accompanying book has spent 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His Republican opponents have lost control of Congress. And the Competitive Enterprise Institute has lost the patronage of Exxon Mobil, which decided to stop financing climate lies and start discussing carbon regulation.
All of which makes for a surreal situation. Al Gore, the man who lost the agonizing 2000 election, has emerged as a force in the debate of the moment. George Bush, his nemesis, is so completely marginal that business guys ignore him. Meanwhile, John McCain and Barack Obama, two leading presidential contenders, are co-sponsoring a cap-and-trade bill in the Senate. To anyone who watched climate politics these past few days, the post-Bush era seemed to be beginning.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/21/AR2007012101106.html?nav=most_emailed 
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