The climate change bill that was supposed to be unveiled in the Senate on Monday is now on indefinite hold. Senator Lindsey Graham, the lone Republican supporter, walked away from the bill because President Obama and the Democratic leadership signaled that immigration reform may come first. Harry Reid responded immediately to Graham’s reasoning, stating that the American people expect the Congress to tackle both issues and there is no reason not to proceed. We’ll know within a couple of days whether the increasingly watered-down climate legislation has any chance of passing in the Senate this year.

That this legislation, which passed the House almost a year ago and was one of Obama’s main priorities, is so close to failure should be a wake-up call to environmentalists—especially with large Democratic Congressional majorities. The interests aligned against reducing our dependence on fossil fuel are legion; in addition to the climate change deniers in the coal and gas industry and the anti-science wing of the Republican Party, many Democratic lawmakers in states dependent on fossil fuels for jobs and cheap energy are also very resistant to change. Environmentalists need to be at the top of their game for any comprehensive energy legislation to have a chance of passing.

Two weeks ago I described why the animosity of some environmentalists towards mainstream economists (coupled with confusion about them) is wrong-headed: economists are by and large strongly on the side of environmentalists, especially with respect to climate change.

This is not just a rhetorical issue with implications limited to bragging rights on blogs; the stakes are extremely high. This is because the political right in the U.S. has mastered the art of messaging, and thoroughly dominated the public policy narrative over the past couple of decades. On the issue of climate change they have clearly dominated the left in every way, sowing widespread confusion that has led to declining public support for bold action.

Think how masterfully the Right has moved the goalposts on virtually every issue since Obama and the Democrats took charge: a healthcare bill similar to Mitt Romney’s is now socialism, closing Guantanamo (agreed to by Bush and McCain) is now appeasing the enemy, and cap and trade, once the mainstream position for addressing climate change that both Obama and McCain agreed on, is now vilified (and McCain, with boundless hypocrisy, joins the chorus against the bill). What we have left in the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill is extremely weak, and even this will face an uphill struggle to pass.

Writers like David Roberts and Bill McKibben, who routinely characterize mainstream economics as somehow antithetical to environmental concerns, are inadvertently spreading the exact narrative that the Right wants everybody to buy into. There is nothing that the coal, oil, and gas lobbies, the anti-environmentalists at the Chamber of Commerce, and the extreme libertarians at the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute want more than for the public to believe that mainstream economics oppose sensible environmental regulations that are fair, transparent, and put a significant price on greenhouse gases. This makes it easy to characterize those in favor of tougher climate policy as leftists who are anti-business, anti-jobs, anti-economic growth, and anti-competitiveness.

But they are wrong.

The overwhelming majority of mainstream economists favor stronger environmental regulation on many fronts, especially climate change. It is the rightwing economists who are out of the mainstream, who believe, contrary to basic economic theory, that an unfettered market can solve environmental problems despite all evidence to the contrary. There’s is not the consensus view.

By routinely bashing mainstream economics, often through faulty reasoning, environmentalists play into the hands of those with an-environmental agenda. The public needs to know that most of the leading minds in economics come down squarely in favor of strong climate change legislation, as well as efforts to improve water quality, clean air, and biodiversity protection.

This will only happen when environmentalists better educate themselves about economics, and realize that it is actually one of their greatest allies.


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