By Adam Solomon Zemel, cross-posted from the Breakthrough Institute
After the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in the lower chamber of Congress with absolutely no support from House Republicans two weeks ago, it was hard to predict what shape the debate would take in the Senate. But with perspective, the course of the Senate debate offers lessons for how we could secure investments in making clean energy cheap, and transform American politics in the process.
Just as it seemed that debate over the stimulus might stall, Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, and Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine took the lead in an effort to bring a centrist approach to the bill in order to secure bipartisan support. What came out of this effort is a bill that slashes necessary and fast acting stimulus in the form of aid for state budgets and money for education, among other spending measures, while expanding tax cuts that will help the more affluent disproportionately to middle and lower class Americans.
This is not the pragmatic moderate politics that these politicians have purported themselves to be practicing, nor is it the principled centrism that is so necessary and enriching to a democratic political system. No, it is better characterized by Ross Douthat:
"You can imagine a world in which "centrist" Senators used their awesome deal-making powers to forge compromises that incorporate ideas from the left and right alike...A world in which Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman emerged as ardent champions of, say, a stimulus approach divided evenly between billions in Keynesian spending and billions for [some] sort of payroll tax proposal.
...But that's not the world we live in. In this world, centrist Senators exist to take politics as usual - whether it's tax cuts in Republican eras, or spending splurges in Democratic ones - and make it ever so slightly more fiscally responsible...Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory."
If, as we have written before, energy politics and policy in the Obama era will be shaped by moderates, then this is not the type of centrism that we should be hoping is prevalent inside the beltway. For the next year or more, any legislation will be measured using two yard sticks--the usual one, which measures the effectiveness of the bill on its own terms and its ability to achieve its goals, and the second one, which will measure the impact of the bill on economic recovery. For legislation to be viable, it must pass the recovery test: "How can we create (insert issue here) legislation that directly contributes to, or at the barest minimum does not impede, economic recovery?"
This Recovery Test will be the political litmus test of all policy for the near future. And as long as centrists in Congress see all government spending as profligate waste, then there will be no chance of passing the legislation that will secure the necessary billions of dollars of public investment in making clean energy cheap that could create a whole new engine of economic growth, including new exporting industries and thousands of jobs.
First we must embrace the Recovery Test ourselves. We, as clean energy advoacates, must create an energy policy framework that actually does what it purports to do: puts people to work, provides growth, and places economic revitalization and American families' financial security on the same level of urgency as curbing carbon emissions. Robert Pollin's Green Recovery Report (pdf) does just that, and other legislative frameworks are emerging that follow suit. And Nancy Pelosi recently said that the point of capping carbon emissions was to raise revenues in order to invest them, which demonstrates that the leaders on energy and climate policy are beginning to understand the new frame.
After we have shifted the frame of our legislation, we must convince moderates and centrists in congress of the necessity and importance, and moreover, the value, of public investment. We must hammer home the reality of how innovation occurs: it simply does not happen without government spending. Radios, jet engines, rocket ships, microchips, the internet--all these innovations were the result of concerted public investment efforts.
We must work hard to turn centrism from a refuge for misers and penny pinchers into a platform for those who believe in good returns on wise investments. These returns could be broad social benefits, or boosted economic productivity, or increased national security, or all three. We must make the principled center a place where moderate politicians identify the investments that are important and beneficial and necessary to working Americans, and work hard to secure them. A new center that looked like this could be absolutely transformative to the American political landscape, and not just for energy.
But energy is the place to start. It is the issue that could transform and renew the political center: it affects our national security, our economic productivity, our international competitiveness and our public health. And once we make our congressional moderates see that making clean energy cheap would put Americans back to work, reduce our trade deficit, provide growth, and make us healthier and more secure, than the new center will work to secure the necessary investments to get started. And technological and political transformation will flow from there.