I’ll save you the trouble of reading everything and do this quickly: Is Byron Dorgan likely to vote yes for the bill? No. For cloture? Possibly. Do we really need him? Absolutely.
Byron Dorgan is a moderate Democrat from North Dakota, which is, on the whole, more conservative than he is. He is nearing the end of his third term as a Senator, which is likely pushing him to think about his actions in the frame of the election he will soon be facing – though he won each of his three previous elections with sizable margins.
Unless you are particularly active in the political arena, you may not have heard of Dorgan. But make no mistake, he is one of the most important Senators in this fight right now, and he has not been positioning himself to vote for CEJAPA, or any other bill that comes along with a cap and trade component. In fact, in 2008, Dorgan was one of only four Democrats to vote against cloture for the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Still, he is not our enemy, and is a potential ally if he can be convinced that the market solution is the middle ground and that speculation can be controlled.
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Senator Dorgan: Vital Stats
- Dorgan's GovTrack Profile
- Fivethirtyeight Probability of Yes Vote (PrY): 22%
- Campaign Finance Report
- He is a top recipient in the Senate of funds from mining (#1, $26,700), lobbyists (#2, $240,113), and electric utilities (#3, $195,910).
- When grouped by sector, energy and natural resources PACs make up the largest portion of his funding.
- Only 4% of his campaign contributions come from within the state of North Dakota, which explains why his largest utility contributor is from the state of Florida.
- North Dakota is ranked first for wind energy potential nationally, but is thirteenth in actual implementation, receiving 93.8% of its energy from coal instead
Many of you may be wondering why Dorgan is so important. He is not in the leadership or on relevant committees (though he does sit on ENR, they already did their damage to the climate bill with the worse-than-bad ACELA), his record on environmental issues is decent, and he seems to be supportive of energy measures. In short, the problem is that Dorgan could do a lot of damage. He is already being very vocal about his disapproval of carbon markets, but could actually be a potential ally since he has stated that he feels we must act on climate change and is supportive of energy legislation. In speeches, such as the one he gave Friday morning on the Senate floor, he talks of the benefits of energy independence and renewables, then immediately transitions into expansion of drilling, mythical zero-emissions coal, and why he distrusts cap and trade (we’ll get to that).
Finally, Dorgan comes from a state that is particularly rich in two very desirable resources – coal and wind. As a result, he is one of the Senators pushing for the severely watered down “all of the above” approach to energy rather than pushing for bold action toward clean energy.
What he has (mostly) right Despite the gloomy picture I just painted, Byron Dorgan leaves a lot of room to work with him. He is very passionate about energy independence and actively pushes for us to use the supplies of energy we have in the United States – though he refers more to coal than renewables. Dorgan approaches the energy security situation with the urgency we demand and is pushing for quick action on energy, but has failed to transfer that urgency into climate or the right solutions to energy security.
Dorgan has shown a general understanding of a need to change the energy system, but does not yet have a grasp of just how significantly it must change. He will adjust only when it is convenient and the research has made alternative energy cheap, stating: "I think we ought to do a lot of everything and do it well." If helping stop climate goes along with this minor energy shift, then he's for it, but he has made it clear that climate alone is not a priority.
Where we run into trouble In spite of his professed desire for energy security - and through energy security, climate security - Dorgan has an amazing cognitive dissonance with respect to actually taking any action. The result of this dissonance is a deep usage of market perversion as the reason to take no action on climate.
Dorgan is extremely distrustful of markets. He references speculation as his justification, saying in a recent speech: “I...do not have any interest in consigning the price of energy tomorrow to the decisions in a $1 trillion carbon securities market that will be populated by investment banks and speculators today that are going to tell us what they believe the price of carbon should be tomorrow.” His fear of speculation is his primary concern with cap and trade and the reason he is using to position himself for a "no" vote on the climate bill.
In fact, most of his concerns about excessive speculation in carbon markets are addressed very seriously in ACES and CEJAPA. Our good friend Joe Romm notes that Dorgan’s recent op-ed in the Bismark Tribune contained information “that mostly suggest he might actually be a real fence-sitter — and a potential filibuster buster — if somebody actually explained the bill to him and worked to address his concerns."
On climate issues as a whole, Dorgan seems to have no trouble leaving those issues for later and would like to split the bill into an energy bill and climate bill to be considered someday later. He has mostly paid climate lip service in his statements on energy legislation, saying "I feel very strongly there's something going on with our climate. We need to be attentive to it, we need to deal with it, but as we do, we have to be smart." To put the nail in the coffin, he then said that climate change legislation "may not be this year. May not even have the votes next year."
Points of Engagement Dorgan needs to understand the urgency of the problem. He has said that he would like to draw out the timeline in order to make sure its done right and avoid introducing new points of speculation, while still saying this is an urgent problem. Further delay on climate right now will push the timeline back until 2011 at the soonest, at which point our urgency is lost. Convincing him that we need to craft our best legislation now and monitor it for leaks later will be key. To help him move more quickly, we need to highlight the following:
- Properly regulated and controlled markets, such as the one in ACES, have significant stability.
- ACELA is too weak to even meet Dorgan's stated goals. We need something as strong as, or stronger than, ACES to make a difference.
- Due to its wind resources, North Dakota stands to gain significantly in jobs and infrastructure from a climate bill.
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman devoted an entire column to the issue of speculation where he made the most important counterargument to the anti cap-and-trade arguments that Dorgan and other moderate Democrats have been using. In this column - likely inspired by Dorgan's op-ed, he argued that the possibility of speculation is inevitable in any market for a commodity that can be traded and stored into the future. He adds that this inevitability has not led us to stop trading commodities such as oil and wheat and that it should not stop us from trading carbon either. Finally, he says (emphasis mine):
By all means keep a watchful eye on speculators and regulate derivatives — and make market manipulation illegal, as Waxman-Markey does. But don’t apply standards to emissions trading that you don’t apply to any other market.
The solution to climate change must rely to an important extent on market mechanisms — it’s too complex an issue to deal with using command-and-control.
In addition to Krugman's arguments, Senators Snowe and Feinstein have been refining carbon market oversight language since 2007 and will likely push for its inclusion in this bill. My understanding is that this language is even stronger than ACES, which already controls the market quite well.
Dorgan has also cited ACELA's "advancement" in a number of speeches. But let's be clear: ACELA is a wolf in sheep's clothing because it does nothing under the guise of doing everything and Dorgan needs to know that. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), among others, estimates that many provisions in ACELA are less than business-as-usual. We need to emphasize this information with Dorgan and stress that ACELA will not achieve his goals of energy security and must be amended on the floor to include stronger renewable energy provisions.
Finally, any climate bill is going to be good for North Dakota, even beyond the national and international benefits of humanity, security, cleaner air, and a stronger ecosystem. A price on carbon and green jobs provisions in the bill will help bring jobs and clean energy to his state. With North Dakota's significant wind resources, his state can gain numerous jobs and become one of the largest exporters of energy in the nation. However, due to the state of the grid and the barriers to investment, transmission incentives and investment in legislation are extremely important.
Thanks both to sherijr and RLMiller for their time and help in writing and editing this diary.