Since the death of cap and trade, careers built around that cause have shifted focus. Cap and trade pols move on

One year ago Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended the climate bill’s misery.

“It’s not a happy anniversary,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who has co-sponsored nearly all the major global warming bills debated over the past decade.


Since the death of cap and trade, careers built around that cause have shifted focus, the national political debate has moved on to debt limits and budget cutting, and dramatic changes envisioned for U.S. energy policy have slipped into a deep freeze.

But with scientists warning that global concentrations of greenhouse gases are nearing a tipping point, many fret that it may be too late by the time Congress returns to the issue.

“I hope we can come back when we can still make a difference instead of in the middle of a catastrophe,” Lieberman said.

Here’s an update on where some of the people and issues at the center of the climate debate stand now:

Lindsey Graham: The South Carolina Republican senator had his hand in just about every hot-button issue during the climate debate, dancing with Democrats on immigration and judicial nominees while dealing with controversial terrain surrounding the details of a cap-and-trade bill.

But Graham put a major dagger into the climate proposal when he abandoned talks with Lieberman and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in April 2010, just days before they were to release a compromise bill that had support from both industry and environmental groups.

These days, Graham has been busy with budget negotiations and commenting on Afghanistan and Libya. Last December, Graham was at the center of Senate maneuvering over the new START accord when he voted to begin debate during the lame duck session, only to eventually oppose ratification. Eventually, Graham thinks, Congress will get another swing at comprehensive energy and climate change legislation because of inevitable outside forces.

“When gas hits $4 a gallon, there’s an opening to have a package of domestic exploration and expansion, ways to retire coal plants and continue to improve emission standards on the transportation side that would be business friendly,” he told POLITICO this week.

Graham also needs to mind his home state’s political scene. Conservatives howled at him for all the work he did with Democrats, with a couple of county GOP parties passing censure resolutions. The senator could be in for a stiff fight come 2014 if he gets a primary challenge from his right. A February survey from Public Policy Polling showed Graham trailing Rep. Joe Wilson, 43-41.

“You know what I’m concerned about is will Iran have the nuclear weapon in 2014,” Graham said. “Where will the country be? I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the country.”

Carol Browner: Obama’s energy and climate czar stood grim-faced next to Reid when he announced he was pulling the plug on the cap-and-trade bill.

Browner lingered in the White House for another half-year before making a beeline for the private sector this spring.

The former Clinton-era EPA chief is back working with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the Albright Stonebridge Group. And she’s at the heart of the 2012 Democratic political machine, serving on the board of directors at the League of Conservation Voters and as a senior fellow and board member at the Center for American Progress.

“Carol has what everyone is looking for — reach, influence and a record of success,” said one environmental activist. “Nobody bats 1.000 and she has progressive Hall of Fame numbers when it comes to winning policy fights.”

As for Browner’s old workplace, House Republicans continue to make symbolic attempts to defund and defang the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy even though Obama already dissolved it. The issues now fall under the umbrella of the Domestic Policy Council, with Browner’s former deputy, Heather Zichal, carrying the portfolio.

Rick Boucher: More than most other House Democrats, the Virginia congressman stuck his neck out when he entered into negotiations on the House’s cap-and-trade bill.

Representing a coal-producing district, Boucher made demands and concessions that helped pave the way for the Waxman-Markey legislation’s passage in the geographically diverse Energy and Commerce Committee.

History didn’t work out so well on the House bill, of course, and Democrats like Boucher were swept out of office by the Republicans’ November 2010 tidal wave. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Boucher had to work on his résumé.

Boucher landed this spring in the Washington offices of Sidley Austin, where he runs the firm’s government strategies practice, focusing on energy and telecommunications issues. He hasn’t been back to the Capitol building since taking his last floor vote in January. And ethics rules mean he can’t lobby former colleagues until early next year.

Still, Boucher said he’s tracking the EPA’s efforts on greenhouse gases and more traditional air pollutants. And he’s not giving up on Congress — eventually — returning to climate change.

“At the moment, most of the action is at [the] EPA, but I’m keeping a close eye on Congress to see what may evolve there,” he said.

As for all the work he did in 2009, Boucher said he has no regrets. In fact, he blames other big legislative proposals that he supported — bailouts for Detroit and Wall Street — as the reason for his defeat.

“[Climate] was an issue to be certain, but other issues were more powerful in terms of driving the vote in my district,” he said.

Carbon storage: Democrats packed their climate bills with incentives for “clean coal” technology, starting with an emissions cap that would have forced power companies to search for alternatives that produce fewer greenhouse gases. They also included a $10 billion fund to speed up the commercial deployment of power plants capable of capturing and burying their CO2 underground.

But with no climate bill in sight, the utility industry isn’t so keen to jump out on its own with the expensive storage technology, which gobbles up plenty of energy just to run.

Last week, American Electric Power scrapped one of the country’s most high-profile “clean coal” plants, a $668 million effort to retrofit a 1,300-megawatt facility in West Virginia. Company officials blamed economic conditions and state regulators for not allowing AEP to charge customers to recover costs. But there were other reasons.

“This is what happens when you don’t get a climate bill,” one senior Obama administration official told The New York Times.

Some energy experts say carbon capture and storage technology hasn’t gone away for good, even if the incentives have.

About 25 other projects are still in the works on a variety of industrial sectors, including a $2.4 billion, 582-megawatt coal plant that Mississippi Power started constructing last year. The plant, which will capture 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year, is slated to come online in 2014.

The Obama administration also remains committed to FutureGen, a decade-old proposal to build a near-zero-emissions power plant. The George W. Bush administration launched the project but later scrapped it because of cost overruns. A scaled-back version, funded with $1 billion in stimulus money, is the new goal, with engineers going to work to clean up an existing coal plant in Meredosia, Ill. Construction, however, has yet to begin.

U.S. emissions: Had Obama signed the climate law, the electric utility, transportation and manufacturing industries would be gearing up now for the opening stages of a cap-and-trade program aimed at forcing a 17 percent cut by 2020 and reductions of more than 70 percent by mid-century.

But the reality is that Americans have pretty much kept pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. emissions during the first three months of 2011 were 1.5 billion metric tons — about the same amount as 2010 and 2009.

Over the next 25 years, the EIA projects a slight growth in U.S. emissions. Power plants, for example, are expected to increase their greenhouse gas emissions 0.6 percent between 2009 and 2035, while transportation emissions are on track to rise about 0.4 percent.

Of course, those are models and projections. The real-world numbers are subject to future EPA climate rules, as well as trends in economic growth and energy usage such as changes in the amount of coal and natural gas that utilities burn. “Absent regulations, you’re going to have the natural fluctuations of the marketplace,” said Perry Lindstrom, an industry economist at EIA.

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story did not fully explain Lindsey Graham's role in the START debate. Graham supported the motion to proceed to the new START agreement in December 2010 but voted against ratification.