Green Tea Party

A major energy and climate bill has passed the House and is on the table in the Senate -- for the first time in history.

Republican Lindsey Graham says the Democratic leadership wants to put the bill on hold -- again -- to rush legislation on immigration reform, in response to the new Arizona law that all but criminalizes being brown. He has, for now, pulled his support from the climate bill in protest.

He's right.

Preserving the planet's ability to maintain human life is more urgent than reforming immigration law. More urgent than health insurance. More urgent than regulating derivatives, whatever in heck those are.

Environmental writer Bill McKibben spoke at my university on Earth Day -- like Al Gore, he was bothered that no strong national movement of voters has emerged to push politicians toward action on climate change. He started 350.org, to advocate a return to 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 -- a point beyond which, he says, the atmospheric composition is incompatible with the stable earth system in which human life developed. We're at around 390 ppm today. 

You know times are strange when mainstream voices are urging civil disobedience -- including Gore.

Thomas Friedman, no radical, suggests that a new green movement should emerge with the passion of the Tea Parties ... to push politicians of both parties to support the climate bill.

Indeed, it is a shame the fossil fuel industries still have such a stranglehold on Congress. But it's the best we're going to get, and we have got to get started. However, without a centrist Green Tea Party movement - one that brings the same passion to cutting emissions that the Tea Party brings to cutting deficits - even this effort will never pass.

This bill introduces a carbon price and other means to control the CO2 emissions of various sectors of the economy, without an economywide cap-and-trade system. The bill's goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. But to garner broad support, it will also expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power and offer tax breaks to manufacturers who make their facilities more energy efficient and create green jobs.

I'm no fan of Friedman's "tic" (as the New Yorker put it) of trying to coin phrases. And as a title for something designed to prevent China from becoming the dominant manufacturer of green energy, "Green Tea Party" sounds an awful lot like something that would happen at the docks in Shanghai, not Boston.

But this makes more sense than most things these days.

Where do we start?

First call your Senators.