Selling the Public on Cap and Trade

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a.k.a. Waxman-Markey, recently passed the House of Representatives by a razor thin margin of 219-212, with 44 Democrats voting against and eight Republicans voting for (see In Close Vote, House Passes Climate Bill: Measure Aims to Change Energy Use). The bill for the first time would limit U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and put a price tag on the ever-shrinking amounts of CO2, etc., that would continue to be emitted. If not for the eight GOP defectors who crossed the aisle to vote for it, the bill would have been doomed to fail.

Now it's up to the Senate to take up its version later this year. Pundits say it will be hard to find the necessary 60 senators to break a GOP filibuster and allow a cap-and-trade bill to come to a floor vote. With yesterday's belated certification of Al Franken as U.S. Senator from Minnesota, the Democrats now have a nominal head count of 60, including two independents who caucus with them. But, says The Washington Post's article:

Efforts to maintain party unity are also hampered by the presence of a clutch of centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), who have said they oppose the public option in health-care reform legislation that would seek to create a government program to compete with private insurers. A number of Senate Democrats representing states that rely heavily on manufacturing jobs have also expressed concern about the climate-change bill, another Obama priority, that passed the House last week.

In other words, there are a handful of Senate Democrats who, as 44 of their House colleagues did on Waxman-Markey, are apt to stray off the reservation on hot-button issues like health care and clean energy.


With respect to energy in particular, why are so many Americans — especially in states that produce coal, depend heavily on agriculture, and/or are parts of the so-called Rust Belt — so averse to shifting to clean energy?

Sure, at first glance it seems as if clean energy endangers their livelihoods — and to a certain extent, some livelihoods are impacted. But clearly, say some of its supporters, "cap and trade" hasn't been sold properly.

Greenwire, a part of the Scientific American web site, has it that (see How To Sell Cap and Trade):

The American public is eager for dramatic change in U.S. energy policy, but Democratic efforts to sell their agenda on energy and climate change aren't reaching voters ... while few voters expect a national energy overhaul to be inexpensive, Democrats are susceptible to Republican arguments that energy proposals will be overly burdensome.

A strategy memo from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the think tank Third Way that the Greenwire story refers to (PDF here) wants the slogan "Get America running on clean energy" to replace talk about "green jobs" and "cap and trade" as the mantra of the clean-energy movement.

The "cap and trade" lingo — "cap" in particular — is "a problem since voters are focusing on policies that promote economic expansion, not limit it":

• "By focusing on capping something, rather than creating something," the memo warns, "we steer the debate down a dead end."
• Global warming, says the memo, is too distant and abstruse a threat to compel voter concern in this time of deep recession.
• Reducing dependence on foreign energy sources is fine, per the memo, but full-scale "energy independence" is seen as a vain hope by the voters and should be jettisoned as a talking point by politicians and policy wonks.

Also:

The [Republican] charge that Democrats' energy plans will cost families an average of $3,000 a year — a number commonly circulated by opponents of the climate legislation — has "resonance and is memorable," the memo warns. Thus the best way to counter that claim is to provide voters with another dollar figure, especially because they have shown willingness to support some cost increases.

And:

"While knowledge about energy is low, the public is convinced there are better ways to make and use energy than those we use currently," says the memo. "And they believe that moving to clean energy will help our economy — and that while change could be difficult, we should act now regardless of the recession."

The memo goes on to recommend changes in the rhetoric used to promote clean energy. That's good, as far as it goes ... but I believe the bigger problem runs deeper than tactics and rhetoric.

The bigger problem transcends our "knowledge about energy," or lack thereof. It involves more than cold calculations, as in "[Republicans claim] Democrats' energy plans will cost families an average of $3,000 a year" — which, as I said in Climate Bill to Cost Average Consumer $175 a Year, isn't even true.

Tactics, rhetoric, abstract knowledge, the so-called facts, mere calculations: they all appeal to the left brain. We've got to get the right brain involved.

The right side of the brain is the seat of intuition, as opposed to linear reasoning; responding to prosody and intonation, as opposed to literal language; holistic, as opposed to analytical, thought; believing in back-of-the-envelope computations, as opposed to exact calculations. Popular usage has it that "right-brained people" are more responsive to poetic and even mythological forms of expression than "left-brained people" are. And so on.

Though scientists tell us that such ideas are exaggerated and we all use both sides of the brain, all the time, the popular caricature is useful. I'd say we need a more right-brained approach to green advocacy.

It's not just about Waxman-Markey as a "jobs bill" — or its sending American jobs to China, depending on who you ask.

It's not just about "jumpstarting a clean-energy economy" — or, say its opponents, deepening the recession.

It's not just about redistributing the money that polluters will pay to get their carbon-emission rights, so that the pain of cap and trade is equitably shared — or, say opponents, imposing a "light-switch tax" that will drain our pocketbooks to no good end.


It's really about protecting Mother Earth from insult and harm, about saving the planet and all its wonders, about who we are and how we see ourselves — about how we re-sacralize the earth.

It's all about the myths we live by. We think we have enlightened ourselves by killing off myth, but myth guru Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth that we still need a mythos to ground us in what is or ought to be sacred.

Ancient myths welded people together into a community, but at the same time placed boundaries between rival communities. Today, the world is a global village. "The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet — and we don't have such a mythology," said Campbell. Today, we need to realize the deep truth of the image of "the whole planet as an organism."

Our early ancestors didn't know they lived on a big sphere orbiting the sun, but they knew they depended totally on the earth as they understood it; their myths and their hero narratives told them of this. When we moderns killed myths and denatured heroes, we may have set up the very planet that sustains us for a death sentence.

The way to get people to buy into cap and trade and other such policy-wonkery is to give them new myths, hero stories, and other such conveyors of sacred truth to their "right brains" — how about using science fiction, children's literature, and comic books for this? — thus to convince them that bills like Waxman-Markey are a needed down payment on unplugging our mother (planet)'s electric chair.