Climate Change Bill’s Murky Battleground: Assumptions and Statistics

On one side of the table were the Democrats. On the other side, where the Republicans normally would have been, there were only empty leather chairs. This was the strange scene in a hearing room on Capitol Hill last week, where Senate Democrats were trying to take the next step on their climate change bill by passing it through the Environment Committee.

Normally, both parties at least attend these meetings. But this time, Republicans decided to boycott. Publicly, they said their main reason for playing hooky was that the bill, which would cap greenhouse gas emissions and pump billions into clean-energy technologies, hadn't been fully analyzed by the Environmental Protection Agency, so they weren't sure what the total costs would be.

Democrats scoffed, saying an "unprecedented amount" of examination had already been done. The EPA agreed. As EPA Associate Administrator David McIntosh said last Wednesday, if the agency were to do the extra analyses Republicans were requesting, the differences in cost would be "vanishingly small."

The Republicans' absence made for great political theater. But the conflict goes much deeper. As the healthcare debate has shown, cost estimates by government economists can have a huge impact on public opinion and political momentum. If a bill costs too much, political support drops; if it comes in under budget, support rises. Yet these analyses almost always rest upon assumptions about future scenarios, which, if changed, can greatly alter the bill's bottom line.

And it's here, in this murky world of assumptions and statistics, that Republicans seem to think they can win points on climate change. As Sen. George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, said last week, Republicans don't just want more EPA analyses; they also want different analyses. They want the EPA to retread its economic modeling using assumptions that they think are more realistic. The likely result would be that the cost of the bill would shoot up.

In a recent letter to EPA chief Lisa Jackson, Voinovich outlined some of these requests. He called, for example, for EPA to run its models assuming that coal plants won't be able to capture their carbon dioxide emissions until 2030. In the current models, Voinovich charged, EPA assumes that such technology will be widely in use by 2020. "These unrealistic assumptions mask the potential economic impacts of the bill," Voinovich wrote.

If the EPA had undertaken these new cost reviews, Democrats would have had to wait five more weeks. But neither California Sen. Barbara Boxer, the committee chair, nor any of the other Democrats on the committee wanted to do that. So late last week, they boldly voted the bill out of committee, with no Republican input and no Republicans voting. "We did it according to the rules," Boxer said. "We did it with dignity."

As it turns out, the legislation is probably going to have to wait for more than five weeks for real action, anyway. Because the bill touches on everything from agriculture to foreign policy, other committees need to give their input before it can go to the floor for a vote.

One important player will be the Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. Baucus also sits on the Environment Committee, where he was the lone Democrat to vote against Boxer's bill last week. He said he was concerned about the bill's impact on businesses and consumers in his rural state.

This week he struck a slightly different tone. On Tuesday, he said that he is "committed to passing meaningful, balanced climate change legislation" and admitted that he's seen the impact of climate change in his home state. "We can see the consequences in decreased snowpack and lower stream flows," he said.

Whether he'll move quickly, though, is a different story. In the healthcare debate, Baucus forced the White House to repeatedly push back its deadlines for reform, saying he needed to move deliberately to craft a bill that could win votes. This week, in a similarly telling note, he said he'd be working on writing a bill "that can muster enough votes to become law."