House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to resurrect a decade-old cap-and-trade bill is more about preventing new progressive lawmakers from hurting the party’s chances in the 2020 presidential race than actually passing legislation, conservative veterans of climate policy suspect.
Freshman progressive Democrats have proposed a “Green New Deal” bill that would mandate transitioning the nation to 100 percent renewable energy by the 2030s. Pelosi unceremoniously laid out more modest plans — namely, revisiting the 2008 cap-and-trade bill — in a town-hall broadcast earlier this month.
The cap-and-trade bill that Pelosi shepherded through the House as speaker in 2008 would have placed a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and other facilities, while establishing a trading system for emission credits that would be bought and sold to allow companies to meet the emissions cap. Even with control of both chambers of Congress and with former President Barack Obama in the White House, the bill foundered in the Senate.
Some right-of-center observers see Pelosi’s decision to resurrect cap and trade as part of a broader plan for preventing her party from overextending on climate issues while they only control one chamber of Congress.
“The speaker, for her part, has no intention of letting her new members vote for any of this stuff on climate,” said Mike McKenna, a conservative environmental consultant who served on the Trump transition team. “She wants to frame the issue for 2020. The last thing she wants is to make anyone walk a plank on a vote to make energy more expensive.”
Pelosi installed moderate Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., at the head of a new select committee on climate change, “specifically to make sure it did nothing but talk,” said McKenna.
Frank Maisano, a partner with Bracewell Policy Resolution Group’s energy and environment team and a former GOP staffer, suggests that cap and trade is not just about pacifying progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., but also about winning the support of centrists.
“For every Ocasio or any progressives that you have, you now have a whole handful of more moderate Democrats that won moderate districts,” Maisano said.
It was those seats in moderate districts that won them the House in the midterm elections, he explained.
“If those people go the ‘New Green’ tax-deal way, where Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats want them to go, those seats are going to go right back to Republicans,” said Maisano, referring to two outside groups that have backed an aggressive climate-change agenda.
[Related: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests 60, 70 percent tax rate for the rich to pay for ‘Green New Deal’]
According to Maisano, Pelosi’s best bet is to advance a compromise measure that puts Democrats on the record with an ambitious climate proposal while at the same time minimizing the risks that members in swing districts are forced to take.
Pelosi is “very pragmatic when it comes to knowing what is in the art of the possible and what isn’t,” especially with respect to a cap-and-trade bill, said Dan Kish, energy adviser to former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and distinguished senior fellow at the conservative Institute for Energy Research.
“My guess is she’s trying to spit chaff out the back end with incoming flak to show that they are doing something, while paying attention to the real details … which is to try to keep people elected and raise enough money and recapture the White House in 2020,” Kish said.
Maisano agrees that, for the Democratic leadership, winning back the White House is a matter of priority and a reason for their reluctance to let progressives set the party’s climate agenda.
“The bottom line is the 2020 debate is what the ‘Green New Deal’ is about,” Maisano said. “This fight for the chance to take on Trump, that’s where it’s going to play itself out.”
