The Land of Flickering Lights

by Michael Bennet

  Ahead of the vote, friends from environmental groups, disappointed by my position regarding the pipeline, reached out to try to persuade me to vote no. They were willing to concede (if only for the purpose of indulging me) that Keystone’s role was symbolic, but they pointed out that it had been a useful tool to organize grassroots activists. Keystone connected the abstract issue of climate change to the lives of many Americans and successfully activated the environmental movement.

  For this reason, someone asked a member of my staff who had the misfortune of defending my position what I would have thought about the civil rights protesters who sat at the Woolworth lunch counters to defy segregation. I found this question clarifying. The young people knew that they would be beaten, literally, on national television for seeking to participate in what amounts to ordinary life—which had the effect of isolating segregationists from the overwhelming majority of Americans. They inspired white northerners, who up until that point had been largely content to look the other way, to embrace the civil rights movement.

  While the Keystone XL campaign generated ferocious enthusiasm among the environmental community, it brought few, if any, who were not already predisposed to join the fight. Unlike the Woolworth protests, it was not designed to persuade a majority of Americans to care about climate change; it was designed to energize those who already cared about environmental issues but had been silent for years—a worthy cause that I support but one that was not comparable. I also doubt very much whether, in the designing of the pipeline campaign, consideration was given to how it might feed a false perception that Democrats were against high-quality construction jobs, against unions, against energy independence, and against building infrastructure in our rural communities, a point Republicans underscored with every Keystone vote. But that is what happened.

  More broadly, the Keystone debate threatened to untether us from a politics rooted in facts, when our most powerful argument was that climate opponents ignored the science. That is a battle we have to win over the long haul, and it becomes harder if the other side can claim that climate proponents are playing fast and loose with the facts.

  In the end President Obama rejected the permit to build Keystone XL, arguing that this strengthened his hand ahead of the landmark climate negotiations in Paris. In his statement, the president lamented the pipeline’s “overinflated role in our political discourse” and described it as a “symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties.” He also dismissed claims that the pipeline represented either a “silver bullet for the economy” or “the express lane to climate disaster.” He offered nuance I had not heard on the Senate floor over the past two years.

  Hailing President Obama’s decision as a victory, 350.org blasted out a message to its supporters:

  This is a big win. President Obama’s decision to reject Keystone XL because of its impact on the climate is nothing short of historic—and sets an important precedent that should send shock waves through the fossil fuel industry … We’re looking to build on this victory, and show that if it’s wrong to build Keystone XL because of its impact on our climate, it’s wrong to build any new fossil fuel infrastructure, period.

  A year later, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.20 He filled his cabinet with some of America’s top climate deniers. He is attempting to cancel the Clean Power Plan and reverse higher fuel-efficiency standards. He opened our coasts and public lands to drilling, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He imposed tariffs on solar panels and sought to subsidize coal-fired power plants. In the first half of his first term, he has the worst environmental record of any modern president—and this at a time when relevant scientific data have never been more abundant. In political terms, our environment is in crisis.

  V. A Job for the 96 Percent

  Like climate change itself, the damage of Citizens United is all around us. I saw it in the partisan applause to Emmanuel Macron’s factual claim when he spoke before a joint session of Congress. But I’ve also seen it on debate stages where candidates stake out positions far outside the political mainstream; on my daily schedules, where whole afternoons are swallowed by ceaseless fund-raising; and in the abysmal approval rating of Congress, which ranks below support for root canals, traffic jams, and Communism.21 Most important, I have seen it year after year on the Senate floor, where the priorities of the American people are met by relentless inaction.

  Many forces contribute to this dysfunction, but the blame lies principally with our broken system of campaign finance. Consider the following: what if Congress passed a law requiring ordinary Americans to disclose their personal campaign contributions and also said they could donate only a certain small amount; allowed the wealthiest Americans to contribute an unlimited sum, anonymously, to organizations Congress deemed “independent”; allowed these same organizations to claim independence even when they were run by families and former staffers of members of Congress; permitted members to speak at fund-raisers for these organizations, so long as they left the scene before their staff asked the crowd for an unlimited donation; and then allowed these organizations to spend whatever they wanted whenever they wanted in our elections.

  This is our existing campaign finance system, as designed by Congress and amended by the Supreme Court. The court has focused narrowly on preventing outsize direct contributions that may constitute corrupt quid pro quo arrangements between donors and politicians. Think of this as a corruption of action. But it lost sight of how big donors can drop giant money bombs on the other side of persnickety legal boundaries. As a result, the court has allowed a broader corruption of inaction to take hold: give me millions (or don’t spend millions against me) and I’ll keep something you dislike from happening. In a 2017 poll asking Americans to rank the sources of dysfunction in Washington, 96 percent blamed “money in politics.” This was followed by the 94 percent of Americans who blamed “wealthy political donors.” The American people see what the Supreme Court does not: that massive outside spending by a wealthy few, even without an explicit quid pro quo, corrupts their government and erodes their faith in our national political institutions.

  To restore our government, we need to confirm justices who will broaden the court’s dangerously narrow view of corruption, established in Buckley and elaborated to devastating effect in Citizens United. We need more justices in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor—the last justice to have held an elective office—who have broad practical experience and know how politics actually works in the real world. But even with a pro-reform majority, the court will need a specific case to revisit its precedent with respect to campaign finance. Theoretically, the court itself may have opened the door. Toward the end of the majority opinion in Citizens United, the court observed that in the future:

  If elected officials succumb to improper influences from independent expenditures … we must give weight to attempts by Congress to seek to dispel either the appearance or the reality of these influences. The remedies enacted by law, however, must comply with the First Amendment, and it is our law and our tradition that more speech, not less, is the governing rule.

  In other words, if circumstances change and new concerns about corruption arise, the court is prepared to review new campaign finance reforms. Of course, an irony of Citizens United is that by unleashing a flood of money in our politics the court has effectively disabled Congress with regard to enacting any such reforms.

  There is no shortage of ideas about what reform could look like. They include banning members of Congress from becoming lobbyists, requiring political groups with anonymous donors to reveal their biggest supporters, and forcing outside groups to disclose who gives them money and where they spend it. After Citizens United, ideas like these survive more as lonely floor speeches than as meaningful priorities on the legislative calendar. A constitutional amendment, though it would be more effective, seems even more implausible. Our greatest hope lies in the vote. If those 96 percent of Americans made campaign fina
nce a real priority in elections, they could soon have a Congress able to enact long-overdue reforms.

  In the meantime, we must look to cities and states to pass campaign finance and disclosure laws to challenge the Supreme Court. For example, Colorado could pass a law that requires full and accurate disclosure of every political ad in our state, establishes limits on super PAC contributions and spending, and defines coordination rules to enforce meaningful independence. Communities from across the political spectrum have already begun to act. Purple states such as Arizona and Missouri have passed laws to publicly finance elections and limit campaign contributions in statewide elections. New York City provides a six-to-one match for all small donations if the benefiting candidate agrees to contribution and spending limits. Seattle provides $25 “democracy vouchers” for voters to contribute as they wish. When these laws prompt legal challenges, as they will, reformers will have an opportunity to develop evidence the Supreme Court never considered: that independent expenditures not only create an appearance of corruption but also lead to actual corruption—the corruption of inaction. Given the explosion of independent expenditures since Citizens United, the universe of potential evidence has only grown.22 Citizens and advocacy groups can help by convening former members of Congress and their staffs to share examples of the specific bills abandoned, speeches shelved, positions disavowed, votes shifted, and facts rejected under the threat of massive outside spending.

  We cannot wait for change in the courts, however, to address the threat of our changing climate. In 2016, Donald Trump successfully argued that reviving jobs and energy sources from the nineteenth century would make America great in the twenty-first. In doing so, he took a sledgehammer to more than a generation of progress on environmental and climate issues, threatening to wreck our global leadership and pull us into the past. His electoral success raises a mirror to the state of our politics around energy, jobs, and the environment. From one angle, we see the Republican Party forcibly dragged from the environmental stewardship of Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and John McCain to the taunting denial of Trump.23 From another, we see millions of Americans hungry for better answers about lost jobs and the difficulties posed by a changing economy. Another tilt of the mirror and we see a Democratic Party that has yet to make a persuasive enough case to draw in (for instance) farmers and ranchers, union members, and the urban and rural poor who don’t yet see how climate change is changing their lives.

  More than any other issue, climate change requires policies that can endure across administrations, even generations. At a minimum, those policies should: adequately account for the costs of climate change without further burdening working families, dramatically accelerate our transition to renewable energy and zero-emission technologies, and prepare our communities for the dangers of climate change we can no longer avoid. Most important, whatever policy emerges has to survive changing political winds. To do that, we have to assemble an unusual—and powerful—coalition of Americans.

  That coalition is hiding in plain sight. In the wake of Citizens United, the Kochs have effectively chained the Republican Party’s position on climate change to their own. Instead of bemoaning this situation, we should seize it as an opportunity. Today, most Republican politicians find themselves locked into a position out of line with a majority of Americans in almost every single congressional district. They find themselves at odds with leading American businesses such as Amazon, Target, and Nike; with a growing number of evangelicals and religious leaders; and with an overwhelming majority of voters under thirty. Republican politicians who deny climate science also occupy a political reality separate from the physical reality that increasingly confronts our outdoorsmen, farmers, and ranchers, who see the land changing with the climate. I am baffled by the newly elected Republicans in the Senate who refuse to acknowledge that the increase in the frequency of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and floods is affecting their constituents.

  This should be an untenable position. But politically it isn’t, because we have failed to construct any politics around climate that would be attractive to a broad enough cross section of voters. Americans are broadly supportive of wise environmental policies; we have repelled many of them by unwise political choices. Instead of galvanizing only those who already see climate as a priority, we have to reach those who have a direct stake in climate issues but may be turned off by our current debate. Climate must be a voting issue. Moral arguments will not be enough. We need to make a forceful case that emphasizes the business potential, high-paying jobs, and pocketbook savings that will come from climate action, along with the dire economic costs of inaction.24

  The rewards of embracing a transition to clean energy are vast. One of the great ironies of efforts to address climate change is that in truth these are wise policies in their own right. I’ve long wondered whether many of those in opposition would have climbed aboard immediately but for the financial hazard to large donors and deep-pocketed special interests. Clean energy, renewable energy, and continually advancing energy technology—all these things would make sense even if the planet were not warming. When President Trump attacks America’s climate policy, he draws from a deep well of smokestack-industry nostalgia and made-up facts; he conjures an America of years gone by, not comprehending the economy we now have and must sustain. Today, more than 3 million Americans work in the clean-energy economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, solar installers and wind-energy service technicians are the fastest- and second-fastest-growing job categories in the country. In Colorado, wind-energy jobs alone are expected to nearly double by 2020. The world is on track to have invested about $10 trillion in solar, wind, and zero-emission energy by 2040, more than all projected investment for fossil fuels. British Petroleum, which is not a coven of wishful thinkers, projects that renewable energy will be the fastest-growing energy source in the world over the next twenty years. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, located in Golden, Colorado, found that renewable energy could comfortably provide 80 percent of US electricity by 2050. Put simply, there is no reason we should lose an argument about jobs and the economy to Donald Trump’s empty promises, no matter how much of the wind in his bag is provided by the Kochs, the Tea Party, and the other forces making the spurious economic case for climate denial.

  If America fully committed to a clean-energy transition, it would unleash a chain reaction of job creation: architects designing more efficient buildings, engineers developing energy-saving lightbulbs, contractors retrofitting an entire nation. At the same time, we could put Americans to work preparing for the dangers of climate change that we cannot avoid: raising bridges, reinforcing levees, strengthening dams, and helping homeowners, farmers, and ranchers prepare for the floods and droughts to come.

  Although the rewards of a clean-energy regime are considerable, the transition will not be painless. America needs a plan to help those working in fossil fuels. Getting there will also take time and will involve the responsible production of natural gas as we scale up to cleaner renewable and zero-emission sources. Meanwhile, we cannot allow actors like the Koch brothers to stall the country’s progress in order to serve their particular interests. Before coal, America’s trains and ships ran on chopped wood. Before petroleum, America’s families lit their homes with oil derived from whale blubber. Imagine if, in the nineteenth century, wealthy captains of dying industries had lavished storerooms of treasure (but for them, pocket change) on lawmakers to preserve an energy economy based on logs and whales.

  I am starting to see cracks in the Koch brothers’ influence. In the last six months, a few of my Republican colleagues have begun to talk about climate change. I attribute this to the increasing diversity of constituents coming into their offices urging them to address the issue. I have reached out to all groups to offer to work together and will continue to do so. That is the only way we are going to create a durable bipartisan solution to climate change. We are getting closer to a politics where we can have a bipartisan dis
cussion in the Senate on how to address climate change—not whether we should address it at all.

  Unlike millions of people across the globe, we have the benefit of a system built for change. The republic our founders fashioned is designed to evolve with the times.25 In their own day, the founders would surely have struggled to imagine how our entire planet could be made to warm because of human activity—just as, I believe, they would have struggled to envision how our courts could have possibly come to take such a warped view of the First Amendment and money in politics. Citizens United is profoundly incongruous with our ideals and constitutional traditions. They would take comfort in knowing that the system they handed down was capable of meeting these challenges—but only if American citizens here on Planet A take action.

  1 The goal of the Paris Agreement is to prevent an average global temperature rise beyond two degrees Celsius. Pursuant to the agreement, each signatory identified and committed to achieve its own national emissions target.

  2 Partly because so many Democrats were swept into office with President Obama in 2008, far more Democratic Senate seats were at stake in 2014. There were a total of thirty-six senatorial seats up for grabs in 2014. Republicans won twenty-four of the seats, a net change of nine, and took control of the Senate for the first time in eight years.