Well, so much for getting a new piece of climate legislation introduced today. As ClimateWire reports:
The Senate climate bill sits on the brink of collapse today after the lead Republican ally threatened to abandon negotiations because of a White House push to simultaneously overhaul the nation's immigration policies.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been under fire from conservatives for months for helping to shepherd a Democrat-led bid to tackle global warming via a "grand compromise" on energy. But on Saturday afternoon, he signaled the partnership could soon be over.
Graham promised to leave President Obama and Senate Democrats standing at the altar after they started pushing last week for a comprehensive immigration reform bill that he called "nothing more than a cynical political ploy" headed into the 2010 midterm elections.
Oh boy. Need I say that this flap augurs extremely poorly for the chances of getting a bill passed any time soon? The politics of this are hard enough already, and now we're stopping before we even got started. Quoted in the ClimateWire piece, I think Tom Friedman puts it best:
"The result is, right now ... in Beijing, they are high-fiving each other," Friedman added. "Oh yeah baby. This means the Americans are going to be paralyzed on green tech for another couple of years. China is already leading the world now in wind production, China is already leading the world in solar production. Where industry goes, where research goes."
