I know the NBA finals are still underway, but a football analogy seems much more apt.

Legislation to cap and reduce global warming pollution didn’t get across the goal line after obstructionist tactics blocked serious consideration of the Climate Security Act, as Frances Beinecke described yesterday. Nonetheless, the process of bringing the Climate Security Act to the U.S. Senate floor advanced the prospects for enacting the federal legislation we need to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

This isn’t obvious from the press coverage or from tuning in on C-SPAN. Most of the week that the Climate Security Act was supposed to be considered by the Senate was chewed up by procedural shenanigans, such as opponents requiring the entire bill to be read into the record (which took nine hours), and by bickering over who is responsible for $4 per gallon gas.

Behind the scenes, however, preparations for Senate floor consideration of the bill caused Senators and their staff to focus on the details of global warming legislation, many for the first time. This not only increased understanding of the legislation, it surfaced the key issues that must be ironed out before a federal climate bill can become law.

A roadmap to these issues can be found in an interesting letter authored by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and signed by nine other Democrats, mostly from Midwestern states. The letter says that these Senators would require changes to the bill before they could support final passage, and highlights eight issues that need to be addressed, including impacts on the economy, technology funding, and the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. All but one of the Senators signing the letter voted to end the filibuster against the bill so that these issues could be considered in a structured amendment process. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) voted no, citing announcements of plant closings in the last week that could cost Ohio 10,000 jobs.

The irony is that the Climate Security Act has provisions intended to address all of these issues, particularly as modified by the substitute amendment developed by Senators Boxer, Lieberman, and Warner after the original bill cleared the Environment Committee. The Stabenow letter, as well as amendments filed by these and other Senators, shows that the bill’s sponsors and supporters still have a lot of work to do to explain these provisions and address remaining concerns without undermining the legislation’s environmental integrity.  

Equally important, Patriots must rally to demand decisive action to curb global warming pollution and build a new energy economy that will free us from dependence on oil, so that political leaders are motivated to resolve any outstanding issues, rather than use them as excuses for inaction. We are going to need a great ground game to beat the Oilers and get effective legislation across the goal line.