There actually are some things going on outside the primaries, here’s what’s piqued my interest the past few days:

• Matt Stoller has more on the Barbara Boxer/climate change bill debacle.  What hurts the most is that she shut down any debate on the left flank, called progressive groups like Friends of the Earth “defeatists,” and pressed forward with a muddled bill that rewards polluting industries without doing the work necessary to provide pushback from the inevitable corporate-funded conservative narratives.  I wish she’d just pull it before she causes lasting damage; we’d be in a much better position next year to get something legitimate passed.

• Here’s a very good profile in The Nation of almost-a-Congressional candidate Lawrence Lessig and his “Change Congress” movement.  I’m kind of waiting for the innovative steps to get this done, but Lessig is a sharp guy.  He’s giving the keynote address at Netroots Nation next month.

• There’s an LA Times exploration of the various health care-related bills moving through the legislature.  They’re all fairly small-bore but I think they will improve the situation out here, by eliminating rescission, mandating that insurers spend 85% of premium revenue on treatment, and including more procedures in baseline coverage, like maternity.  As long as we have the insurance system, we need to do what we can to make sure it’s not as thieving as possible.

• There’s a new Field Poll on Arnold and the legislature out today that is a cavalcade of bad news – the right track/wrong track numbers are 22/68, the Governor’s approval rating is down to 41%, and the legislature is at 30%.  Californians don’t like their government right now.  Some leadership might solve the problem.

• The salmon are dying in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta because of ammonia runoff from sewage treatment plants, and purifying the Delta could cost up to $1 billion.

• Here’s another personal story of how the foreclosure crisis is hurting individuals, this one in the Central Valley town of Merced.  It’s impacting practically the entire economy of the town.  Just another example of the mess we’re in from over-speculation and lax oversight of the financial industry.  

Starting today, the Senate is debating a standalone global warming bill for the first time in three years.  This is a significant achievement in and of itself, and it’s worth praising Barbara Boxer for putting the issue front and center.  However, the bill she is promoting, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, is not only insufficient to the challenge (which I could live with), but represents a trillion-dollar giveaway to polluters who would not have to pay for the right to spew greenhouse gases into the air, a position completely at odds with the positions of all of our top Presidential candidates.

Boxer has co-authored a bill with Bernie Sanders that is superior, and Ed Markey’s bill is a great improvement as well and would slap a license on major polluters that they would have to purchase at auction.  This money would be invested in technological research and alternative energy sources, as well as offset price increases for consumers.  Lieberman-Warner does none of this, and Sen. Boxer has shrugged her shoulders and said “this is the best we can do.”

Though Boxer has worked to strengthen the bill, she says it’s still not as strong as she’d like. “This represents a consensus document,” she said at a recent press conference. “It’s not everything that Sens. Lieberman, Warner, and Boxer want. It’s the best we could do.” During floor debate, she plans to push for stricter emission targets and a greater percentage of auctioned emission permits, and she has threatened to pull the bill if it’s weakened, as has Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Many senators will be offering amendments, so attempts to water down the bill are sure to come, along with efforts to toughen it. Meanwhile, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Senate’s most notorious global-warming denier, will be trying to scuttle the bill altogether.

The sausage-making in the Senate is always painful, and surely the global warming deniers on the right and their corporate lobbyist buddies have in mind only the total stoppage of this bill.  I’m open to concessions where necessary, but giving away pollution credits without an auction is to me non-negotiable.  If you allow polluters to continue doing so for free it’s going to be next to impossible to get them to pay in the future.  And this is completely out of line with what is sure to be the stated Democratic platform at the convention.  There’s enough of a left-right split on climate change not to open up this other front on the left.

There are many dangers for this bill.  A proposed amendment that would subsidize the nuclear power industry could be a deal-breaker on all sides.  I understand the contention that the hour is getting late to make meaningful progress in reducing the effects of global climate change.  The latest scientific assessment from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program notes,  we are already seeing rising temperatures, more heat waves and droughts, and a global rise in sea level due to man-made contributions.  But fixing the climate means fixing the climate, not a half-measure that rewards corporate America.

Climate Progress is live-blogging the hearings.

I have the greatest respect for Barbara Boxer and the work she’s doing on the issue of global warming.  However, I think it’s a shortsighted approach for working to pass a bill that she thinks George Bush can sign, a climate change bill that would set up a cap and trade system and just give carbon credits away to polluting industries.  There’s been a simmering battle between environmental groups on this bill, and now it’s exploded into the open, with the Sierra Club coming out against the bill, known as Lieberman-Warner (which should tell you something).

Fast-forward to present day: the carbon industries are lobbying to get a deal done this year that would give away carbon permits free of charge  to existing polluters — bribing the sluggish, and slowing down innovation. And  politicians are telling us that while it would be better to auction these  permits and make polluters pay for putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, creating that market unfortunately gets in the way of the politics.

We are being urged to compromise — to put a system in place  quickly, even if it is the wrong system.   Given that we only have one chance to get this right before it’s too  late, our top priority must be to make sure that we do not settle prematurely  and sign a weak bill into law in the name of doing something about global warming.   With momentum for strong action and a friendlier Congress and White House building every day, it’s no coincidence that some wish to settle their accounts now.

This will tie the hands of the Presidential candidates on the Democratic side, who have far better proposals for their cap and trade system, including selling the carbon credits at a 100% auction, using the funds to promote green energy and research for renewables.  It’s the wrong bill at the wrong time.

over…

I know that Sen. Boxer wants to use her status as the head of the Environment Committee to push this compromise bill forward.  But the political calculus next year could be excellent for a real bill with real teeth, and Boxer would be leaving that on the table.  As I mentioned earlier this week on my home site, Sens. Obama and Clinton are co-sponsors of this Lieberman-Warner bill, which was initially authored by John McCain, and so this has the potential to totally take global warming as an issue off the table for the 2008 elections.  They ought to take their names off the bill, but it would be better for involved if this doesn’t pass.  As Matt Stoller writes:

…it’s the huge number of new liberal anti-carbon energy voters out there that are going to allow the public to get a sustainable deal on climate change next Congress.  There’s some evidence that Obama might make global warming his highest priority, having promised to begin negotiating a new Kyoto-style treaty even before taking office.

All of this is excellent and game-changing news that we’ve seen happen in the last week or so.  As a reminder, here’s what Boxer said just two weeks ago about Friends of the Earth, which has waged a campaign called ‘Fix it or Ditch it’ about the massive Lieberman-Warner bill to subsidize polluting industries.

“They’re sort of the defeatist group out there,” she said. “They’ve been defeatists from day one. And it’s unfortunate. They’re isolated among the environmental groups.”

This nasty slur, while not true at the time (Greenpeace was opposing the bill), is now silly.  At least one big green group has moved in response to Wynn’s loss to get a better deal, and the business right, the coal producers, the nuclear industry, and the oil guys know they will have to deal soon.  The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth have said that we must work on global warming, but that it must be done smart and sustainably.

We’ve been down this road before.  The rising cost of gasoline and worries about peak oil led everyone to go running toward biofuels in a desire to “just do something,” and now we’re learning that the production of biofuels costs more energy than the savings from biofuels themselves.  So now we’ve created this giant windfall for agribusiness, and nobody wants to reverse the ship because it’d be politically unpopular to enact what some would see as an “anti-environmental” initiative.  

A “deal” on a bad cap and trade bill would have the same effect.  It would lock in a giveaway to polluters on the order of trillions, and make it very difficult for the next President to do anything about it.  If you care about the environment, I think you need to let Sen. Boxer know that only a real climate change bill that hits the necessary targets is sufficient.  Otherwise, she has to walk away from this.

I went out to see Sen. Feinstein speak to the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce this afternoon.  The speech was billed as an address on the environment, and that was surely part of the speech (which I’ll summarize below).  But of more pressing concern to the Chamber was the growing unease with the economy in California and across the nation.  Sales taxes and auto sales have flattened out here in Santa Monica, and that represents 22% of all municipal revenue.  As this was the focus of a short panel before Sen. Feinstein’s remarks, she felt compelled to address it.  On the economy, she said that the coming year will be very difficult.  She called for the need to address the mortgage crisis and a need to extend unemployment benefits as part of an economic stimulus package.  But interestingly, she added this (paraphrasing from notes):

I hate to say it, but I don’t believe the Governor’s budget helps.  The cuts are very deep, and you cannot fund debt through accounting tricks and through floating bonds.  That’s the most expensive kind of budget funding there is.

I’d love to know why she “hates to say” that she has a substantive policy difference with a Republican governor who is trying to run the state into a ditch for generations to come.  It really shouldn’t be that hard to say.  The lack of forcefully connecting the Governor to the fiscal mess we’re in accounts for the fact that he continues to maintain high approval ratings despite the state’s wrong-track number approaching 60%.

The Senator dared not mention the “t” word, and stayed away from what an ultimate solution should look like.  But there was applause when she decried the Governor’s approach.  Clearly, people are more than willing to hear this argument; it just needs to be coupled with a realistic look at a solution that ends the perpetual motion machine of  budget crises in the state, and structurally fixes the revenue model.

More on her speech on the flip…

On the environment, Sen. Feinstein touted the green credentials of Santa Monica (“as good a green city as we have in California”) and legislation she introduced to expand the red subway line to the Pacific Ocean, which is 20-plus years in the making.  But while offering a very stark, almost “Inconvenient Truth”-like assessment of the scientific proof of global warming and its potentially catastrophic effects (she cited the escalating ice loss in Antarctica and essentially concluded that coastal cities would be wiped out without meaningful action), Feinstein continued to champion flawed, incremental approaches that don’t meet the targets we need.  She touted the recent passage of the federal energy bill (which she authored), and weirdly said that “the House couldn’t get their bill through,” when in truth the House bill would have been much more impactful, but the Senate couldn’t show the leadership and had to drop two key elements of the legislation, which would have set a renewable energy standard and removed the massive tax breaks for Big Oil (also, the bill includes massive expansion of biofuels, which many are starting to see as counterproductive).  She cited hard statistics, that we need to reduce emissions by 65-75% below 1990 levels, then endorsed the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill, which only gets us 60% below 2005 levels.  Lieberman-Warner, of course, is a half-measure that would set up a cap-and-trade system without auctioning off the credits, essentially giving away the right to pollute to the nation’s biggest industries.  But Feinstein said that while “it isn’t perfect,” the bill is “the best bet today for passing comprehensive global warming legislation.”  This is a push and pull that has been bubbling in the environmental community for some time.  Reasonable people can disagree.  But unsurprisingly, Feinstein went for the half-measure (and Barbara Boxer isn’t covered in glory here; she reported the same bill out of the Environmental Committee).

On a final note, Sen. Feinstein said that “I hope the next President will give California the waiver (to implement its tailpipe emissions law) it needs.”  She very specifically explained how the EPA action was political and not environmental, and she announced that she has asked the Inspector General of the agency to open a full investigation.