The Wages of Partisanship

The White House's victory on health care may taste sweet, but Republicans on Capitol Hill warn that it has left them embittered, and that will only make President Obama's next battle harder. The most immediate victim will be the climate bill, which has passed the House of Representatives, but not the Senate.

Despite setbacks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last year, the environmental community hasn't lost hope that something big is still possible. "The public wants more security and less pollution, so that's what we're hoping the Senate will do next," says Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters. Still, polls show that climate change has waned as a public concern.

Democrats can only move forward if they make enough concessions to win a handful of Republican votes to avoid a filibuster. The process has already started with the name: what used to be touted as a "climate bill" is now widely referred to on Capitol Hill as an "energy measure" to make it sound like an economic and national security issue, rather than an environmental one.

For several months, Democrats' key GOP ally on energy has been Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been working on a comprehensive energy bill with Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman that the trio plan to unveil next month. The original idea was for Graham to help bring his conservative colleagues into the fold, and thus surmount the filibuster threat. "It's all about Graham's ability to pull in other Republicans," says David Roberts, a senior writer for online environmental magazine Grist.org. "That ability has almost certainly been reduced." By Graham's own admission, the passage of health care, which increased populist anger in conservative states, has made that tougher.

But it's not a lost cause. A band of 22 senators sent a letter to Senate leadership this week urging for the wheels to start moving on energy, and suggest they could bring about 30 more of their colleagues on board if there was a serious proposal on the table. They would all be Democrats, but vote counters have identified seven Republicans who are “possibly gettable." Moderates like Maine duo Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins could likely be won over with goodies in the bill. Massachusetts moderate Scott Brown might also want renewable energy subsidies for his state, which has a growing off-shore wind sector.

The most measureable impact of health care on climate will end up being what makes it into a bill. Democratic leaders on the environment like Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer gave up hope months ago for a cap-and-trade program designed to reward innovators at the expense of top polluters. Now, the best hope for Democrats may be a sweeping energy bill that emphasizes American-produced power (some clean, some not) that likely won't address U.S. carbon emissions in a substantial way. Such a measure won't be exactly what Democrats and environmentalists had in mind when they elected Obama in 2008. But if health care is any indication, they'll take what they can get.