Think John McCain is the real maverick of the GOP? Think again. The 2008 presidential candidate never co-authored a New York Times op-ed with Sen. John Kerry about the need for climate legislation. But Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has. That’s right. Graham is the new face for bipartisanship and what those on the Hill call “reaching across the aisle.”
Graham, who recently said in town hall meeting in his home state that he wasn’t going to let the GOP be “hijacked by Ron Paul,” is no stranger to compromising with Democrats on what many of his constituents consider big government legislation and liberal stances. There was his support of amnesty for illegal immigrants (not a popular position in S.C.), his support of TARP, and his public support of Sonia Sotomayor.
Now, Graham has made it clear that he will support the cap and trade of the Waxman-Markey bill if Democrats include provisions that support nuclear power expansion and off-shore drilling. So what was it that caused the southern Republican to compromise on cap and trade with the Democrat from the north, who is the Senate front man for the bill?
Graham’s reasoning is simple. For him, curbing carbon emissions to stop global warming goes hand in hand with energy independence and national security. “You can’t look at it in isolation […] What if I took something you agree with, that this country had a lot of resources that need to be explored and extracted, and every barrel of oil that we can find off South Carolina with South Carolina’s permission, and natural gas deposits, make us more energy independent?” said Graham in an interview with the New York Times. “What if you married those two things up? And took some of the revenue from oil and gas exploration and put it toward reducing our carbon dependency?”
The energy independence argument sounds reasonable enough. The United States sends millions of dollars every day to hostile countries in the Middle East. Who wouldn’t want to find a way to reduce that dependence by exploring U.S. oil reserves? The question now though, is whether a cap and trade bill is the best way to go about bringing that independence.
According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t think so. Testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf warned that a cap and trade bill would force a shift from emissions-intense industries like oil and refining to low-carbon businesses like wind and solar power.
But the net effect of that, says Elmendorf, is a rise in unemployment, since labor markets “don’t move that fluidly.” That’s not good news when the national unemployment rate is teetering just under 10 percent. According to Elmendorf, the bottom line with the cap and trade bill is that while new jobs might be created for some, that doesn’t mean significant costs won’t be born by people in other industries.
Elmendorf also pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of the expansion of nuclear power plants- which is part of Graham’s compromise- is cause for a lot of uncertainty in the success of Waxman-Markey. The EPA’s analysis of the bill assumed 100 new nuclear facilities in the next two decades, but no new power plants have been commissioned in the last twenty years. And even if new nuclear plants are planned, the government only has the authority to guarantee loans for just four. That means that even if Senator Graham pushes really hard for the expansion of nuclear power in the name of national security, the likelihood of that happening anytime soon is slim to none.
Graham’s efforts to compromise on climate change may be applauded by some, but facts and reality say that his approach is more than a little misguided. As a recent Washington Examiner editorial astutely noted, regardless of what the Democrats agree to in regards to nuclear power and off-shore drilling, that won’t stop the efforts of environmental activists and federal bureaucrats from stalling such action. Meanwhile, the cap and trade bill will “almost immediately begin inflicting devastating economic consequences…”
The U.S. economy currently depends on carbon-based fuels. No piece of legislation will be able to change that without significant negative consequences like a rise in unemployment, higher prices at the pump, and an increase in household’s electricity bills. Graham would do well to recognize this since the people of South Carolina won’t care if Graham was a champion of bipartisanship if they’re losing jobs while paying $4 a gallon for gas. Perhaps, to borrow a phrase from the other S.C. senator, this will eventually become Graham’s own “waterloo.”
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Amanda Carey is the Editor of The Tiger Town Observer at Clemson University. She has previously worked for Robert Novak and has been published in Reason Magazine and The American Spectator.
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