This post is for anyone wishing to dig in deeper on missteps and next steps on the climate challenge. As promised in my initial post on Matthew Nisbet’s “Climate Shift” report, here are more detailed comments from Nisbet and Joe Romm of Climateprogress, who is one of Nisbet’s staunchest critics.

I sent them four questions “related to the overall question of influence, effort and outcomes after nearly a decade aimed at producing a comprehensive climate bill centered on carbon trading.” (The questions will look familiar if you read today’s piece):

1) Unless I’m missing it, I don’t see anyone noting that lobbying, communication and education expenditures (and person hours of work) related to climate legislation were hardly operating in a vacuum. Can any analysis of influences on a legislative battle exclude campaign contributions, for instance?

2) One thing I don’t see explored in the report, and certainly don’t see discussed by Matt’s critics, is what seems like a profound strategic failure on the part of environmental groups and their allies — the failure to compromise earlier in the legislative effort. The debate over the past week has been confined to actions during the end game of a decade-long process. But to my mind, the path toward failure was being carved years ago.

The first failure came when Senator McCain added provisions favoring nuclear to the McCain-Lieberman climate bill. The next was over the safety valve provision in the Bingaman climate bill, which Joe Romm (and many others) rejected out of hand, even though Joe last year (Marketplace climate panel with Michael Levi) noted the need for compromise: “The game changer for the world isn’t between no price for carbon and a high price. It’s between no price for carbon and any price…”

If you agree this was a problem, was climate campaigners’ unwillingness to compromise the result of overconfidence or something else?

3) One other hard reality, hidden by squabbles over which side wielded a bigger portion of its giant war chest, alliances and person-hours toward climate victory or defeat, is that the issue has never had the salience that would be required to get anywhere near 60 votes in the Senate, let alone a simple majority. The key graph showing this is not from Matt’s paper but http://www.slideshare.net/Revkin/six-americas-study-of-climate-views”>from the first Six Americas report.

When even the “alarmed” population in America was equivocal on cap-and-trade — well before Climategate — why in the world did anyone ever think realistically that a bill was a real prospect?

4) Here’s one resulting  hypothesis of mine (perhaps unfalsifiable): The spending/influence debate, as cast in the report and ensuing critiques, is academically valuable, perhaps, but nearly meaningless in assessing the roots of climate action or inaction for one reason: It presumes that both sides in the fight had an equivalent task in either gaining or avoiding 60 Senate votes.

In reality, those defending the status quo in energy and climate policy have always only needed the slightest bit of doubt and distracting uncertainty to maintain society’s comfortable inertia on energy. Inertia is easy. Change is momentously hard as long as humans are in their fossil-fueled comfort zone.

Here’s Joe Romm’s main reply:

Andy, I must say these questions surprise me. And I simply don’t think these issues can be resolved by email. Did you even read Nisbet’s report in full or my various comments on it?

1) Nisbet has a (brief) discussion of campaign contributions. He notes that opponents of the bill outspent enviros 10-to-1 on independent election expenditures in 2010. He also has a calculation of campaign contributions, which CAPAF researchers have critiqued. I discuss that all here….

Here is what [the Center for American Progress Action Fund] found when we redid the analysis — a nearly 9-to-1 advantage for opponents in the 2010 cycle:

Reality: During the Key 2008-2010 Cycles, Polluters Donated $100 Million MORE to Candidates and Members of Congress Than Environmentalists and the Alternative Energy Sector.


2) Well, yes, Andy, as I point out in the above post: In Nisbet’s entire 99-page treatise on the causes of the failure of the climate bill you will not find the word “filibuster” or “60 votes” or any discussion at all of the very high bar required to pass any legislation in the Senate. Every single analysis to date of the failure of the climate bill has emphasized this critical fact, which Nisbet ignores entirely. Why? Because if he were to it emphasize the Senate bottleneck, it would undercut his effort to blame enviros and scientists and Al Gore.

I’m puzzled by your claim about this “failure to compromise earlier in the legislative effort.” After Republicans had rejected a BTU tax and repeatedly rejected the innovation agenda (contrary to Nisbet’s claim that this was the obvious non-polarizing strategy to pursue), enviros moved to “compromise” by embracing the Republican-invented, business-friendly strategy of cap-and-trade, as I lay out here….

By 2008, cap-and-trade was essentially the only policy left standing but could meet the majority of the eight criteria I spell out in that post — and the only one that could meet all 8.

I don’t get this phrase at all: “the path toward failure was being carved years ago.” Folks like Gingrich and McCain and many other Republicans endorsed cap-and-trade — are you suggesting that environmentalists were supposed to know that that was all some sort of bait and switch trick?

Passing a bill through the House was an incredible achievement, one that most people thought couldn’t happen. Inhofe said it wouldn’t.

THEN the enviros began extensive compromising as they worked with Lindsey Graham, so I have no idea what you are talking about in terms of failing years earlier. I do think Senate strategy was not optimal, as I have written, but it is exceedingly difficult to separate the environmentalist strategy from Obama’s failure to push the bill hard in the Senate.

3) Here you make exactly the same mistake Nisbet did. You confuse polls Measuring public concern with global warming (which varies according to a great many factors and critically depends on how you phrase the question, as Krosnick has shown) — with public support for strong climate action. A dozen polls that I have posted and reposted countless times (see the cap-and-trade post) make clear the public supports strong climate action almost no matter how you phrase it — even in the depths of the recession — certainly throughout 2009 and 2010.

Again, the fact that the bill passed the House is a reflection of the broad public support. It is well known that the Senate is far less responsive to polls. The anti-democratic, super-majority 60-vote “requirement” gives the minority a stranglehold — and obviously the way the Senate is set up, that minority can itself reflect a far smaller minority of actual votes.

So please do not suggest that failure to get the 60 votes in the Senate means the public didn’t support the bill. If you have evidence to refute the dozen polls, provide it.

Now, again, I and many others have said that the environmental movement has not done a good job of creating a grassroots movement on climate that might cause the kind of concern in people contemplating voting against needed to win those 60 votes. But that is a very different issue. Ultimately, health care reform had to be passed through reconciliation (i.e. it didn’t get 60).

4) Your hypothesis is one that I and others have made over and over again. I made the precise point in the cap-and-trade post: the super-majority “requirement” is impervious to public opinion. The notion that selling the status quo is easier than selling action goes back At least the Machiavellia’s Prince, if I remember it correctly.

BUT again, if you are going to push your hypothesis, then I assume you are going to criticize Nisbet for having no discussion whatsoever of this central point. I mean seriously, a 99-page paper that presumes to be a serious postmortem on the climate bill — and no discussion of the 60 vote supermajority requirement. A no discussion of the lack of leadership by President Obama, both of which are considered major factors by most independent experts.

But I repeat, I simply don’t think these issues can be resolved by email.

Here are Nisbet’s replies to the four questions

1 a) The context for spending

Historically on climate change, we’ve tended to focus heavily on spending as the key variable influencing legislative outcomes, with Greens asserting that they remain massively outspent.  Yet this David vs. Goliath narrative shields environmental groups and their allies from critical self-reflection, from considering new paths forward, and from investing in new people and ideas.

In the chapter, with this perceptual barrier in mind, I assess the financial resources of the longstanding coalitions working for or against policy action, careful to situate spending in the first paragraphs of the chapter as one variable among many influencing legislative outcomes (se discussion of past study by Baumgartner et al.)

When it comes to organizational resources and mobilization, the analysis in the chapter shows that the major national environmental groups bring in vastly more in revenue, spend more on all programs, and spend more on program activities specific to climate change and energy than their longstanding opponents among conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations.

The chapter provides additional details and context on the limits that Green groups faced in how they could spend their money and their strategies for overcoming those limits (such as partnerships with corporations).  It also further breaks down different areas of spending such as lobbying, careful to acknowledge the uncertainties in assessing which side spent more across these specific areas.

The depth and complexity I built into the chapter is intended to convey that organizational resources and spending indeed do not exist in a vacuum. Just as it is a fallacy to say that Greens were massively outspent and therefore were bound to lose, it is also a fallacy to say that simply because Greens mobilized more organizational resources they should have won.

1 b) On donations to Congress

One of the specific areas of spending I discuss are donations to elected members of Congress from groups supporting or opposing the House and Senate bills.  These figures were provided through direct consultation with Jeffrey Friedman, Research Director of Maplight.org, an independent, nonprofit organization that compiles donations across bills based on data culled from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Their database records show that in the two years leading up to the House vote, donations to elected members of Congress from interest groups supporting the bill outnumbered the donations from interest groups opposed to the bill nearly 9 to 1 ($35 million to $4 million).  Similarly, on the Senate bill, in the two years leading up to its August 2010 failure, donations to elected Senators from interest groups supporting the bill outnumbered those from groups opposed by 5 to 1 ($6.4 million to $1.2million.)

In statements made at his blog, Joe Romm contests the data compiled and provided by Maplight.org, the leading research organization in this area.  I sent his post to Jeffrey Friedman.  We are consulting again this week.

2) I would argue that even before discussing strategic errors related to compromise around specific areas of legislation, we need to consider whether a “big bill” approach such as cap and trade – that required technically complex deals with almost every relevant special interest and industry sector in the country –was ever even politically possible or sustainable if it did manage to pass.

A non-incremental policy shift on the scale with welfare reform, health care, or immigration reform, not only requires the mobilization of massive financial resources, as Greens accomplished in 2009-10, but also the mass mobilization of public opinion.  As you allude to in a later question, the very nature of cap and trade legislation (highly complex, few perceived benefits) fails to elicit strong intense support from among even those alarmed by climate change.

Anthony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach’s survey research shows that during the cap and trade debate, those concerned about climate change reacted when asked about cap and trade with very limited emotional intensity (what they call affective imagery).  Those who were dismissive of climate change, in comparison, reacted with strongly emotional responses to questions about cap and trade legislation.

When asked, a majority of Americans say they support a cap and trade-like policy. Yet analysis of surveys also show that that there is very little commitment or intensity behind this preference and that respondents’ preferences shift relative to specific costs that are provided in the context of the question. Moreover, action on climate change has never been perceived as a top policy priority relative to other issues, especially over the past three years given the economic woes.

This goes to what I describe in Chapter 4 as the policy-dependent nature of wider public perceptions as well as our own ideological biases as a community of people actively working to create social change on the issue.  Cap and trade easily activates strong values-based opposition from right-leaning Americans and can be efficiently folded into a larger narrative about big government. These emotions are also activated when an easily identifiable partisan figure such as Gore is perceived as the chief spokesperson for the issue.

The mobilization problem also applies to keeping cap and trade in place if actually passed.  As the country moved through left-right political swings, and future downturns in the economy, cap and trade legislation would always be under immense political pressure from a variety of interest groups and members of both parties.

So we can debate strategic errors at compromise – which there have been many – but that glosses over the more fundamental question of whether or not cap and trade legislation was ever politically viable, and even if passed, politically sustainable in the long term.

[This mobilization problem was highlighted in our panel last year at Harvard, see #2 at the write up I did, the exchange between William Clark, Tom Patterson, yourself, and me.]

3) The considerations of emotional intensity also apply strongly to this question (see above), but as I additionally discuss in Chapter 3, so do the up and down cycles of overall news attention to the issue.  As the Chapter details, in 2010 as the Senate version of cap and trade was being debated, overall news attention had taken a substantial downward turn from 2009 levels, in part because of the likely loss of perceived political viability.  This represents a process of news coverage of a science-related issue both reflecting and shaping policy developments, as I have tracked in other studies and as are cited in that Chapter.

4) The spending dimension is valuable beyond an academic analysis, since it challenges the David vs. Goliath narrative that prevents the environmental community from critically assessing their own mistakes or chosen paths, starts to reveal those areas where the environmental movement have clear organizational and resource advantages, and evaluates those areas of spending where Greens are still not able to get around their limits.

For example, in Chapter 1, I am careful to note the uncertainties in estimating what was spent specific to lobbying.  The best that can be said is that through investment in partnerships with corporations, Greens narrowed the gap over past legislative battles in terms of what could have been applied to lobbying.

If environmental groups are now saying that the heavy investment they put into forming USCAP and partnering with corporations was for naught, then they should come forward and fully disclose the exact role and resources these corporate partners devoted to the cap and trade battle.  This would help inform decision-making as to whether relying on corporate partners is a reliable strategy for the future.  If corporate partners cannot be relied on, then it suggests that a big omnibus, regulatory solution bill like cap and trade (i.e. a legislative battle on the scale, if not greater than health care reform) may not be possible and instead other policy paths need to be taken.

Changing the status quo…and Filibuster

On the changing the status quo and getting to 60 votes in the Senate, this connects to the mobilization challenge previously discussed.  But it also links to the advantages held by the coalition of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations, despite the fewer financial resources they employ overall and spend specific to climate change and energy-related activities.

As I write in Chapter 1 of the report, in comparison to the relative diversity in goals among national environmental groups historically, conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and aligned industry associations are marked by a much narrower outlook focused on limited government, reduced regulation and economic growth.  Moreover, conservative groups could efficiently fold cap and trade legislation into a larger meta-narrative opposing big government, taxes, “socialism” and “Obamacare.”

These organizations and their industry allies are also advantaged by virtually unanimous opposition to cap and trade among Republican members of Congress, with many Republican leaders echoing the communication strategy of conservative groups by casting doubt on climate science and exaggerating the costs of action.  Democrats in Congress have been divided by geography and ideology in their support for legislation, with moderate Midwestern Democrats from coal, manufacturing and farm states more reticent to vote for cap and trade.

The uniformity in outlook among Republicans and the divide among Democrats, in combination with the 60 votes needed in the Senate to pass legislation, again underscores the mobilization challenge in regards to a “big bill” strategy such as cap and trade as discussed earlier.