And Here in the Nation’s Capital

Two weeks ago the Washington area received a dusting of about 24″ of snow.  For those of us who have lived through a couple of New Hampshire winters without bothering to turn the heat on, this was not expected to be a cause for alarm.  But we were unprepared for the unpreparedness of the nation’s capital.

The federal government saw its shadow, turned around and took the week off. The Dow Jones Industrial Average immediately gained 25 points, but there is no reported connection between the events.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic senators challenged GoP senators to a day-long
snowball fight, but no-one could agree on the rules of engagement.  At one
point Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) agreed to fight on the side of the Democrats, but the deal fell apart when he stuffed snow down the back of Sen. Reid’s collar.   Sen. Kerry (D-MA) sounded confident of victory, since his side outnumbered the opposition, but backed down when Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) threatened to stand up and talk at him all day.  Finally the snowball fight got under way, but when Republicans noticed that Sen. Snowe was throwing from the Democratic side, they all targeted the Republican senator from Maine.  Noting that Sen. Landrieu (D-LA) was throwing her snowballs from the Republican side, Democrats finally left the area, complaining that the opposition was not playing by the rules.

Mid-week the area was hit with a second flurry of snow (18″).  Some terror-stricken citizens were convinced that it portended the End of Days and that the Rapture was just around the corner;  (it turned out to be not the Rapture but the official District of Columbia snowplow stuck in a snowdrift).

President Obama tried to calm Congressional Democrats and other jittery Washingtonians by saying “we have nothing to fear but watch your footing.”

The snow had barely stopped falling when global warming denial professionals announced that the weather event disproved the existence of global warming once and for all.

(Note to readers:  we’ve moved off the light-hearted stuff now;  the last paragraph is absolutely true, as are the following).

Sen. Lindsey Graham’s new draft energy bill, released last week, is even weaker than John Kerry’s bill (S1733) of last year.  It defines clean coal as ‘renewable’, and is not expected to lead to significant deployment of true renewables;  it’s also not known whether Graham expects to fold his bill into the climate/energy bill he is working on with sens. Kerry and Lieberman, but it is certainly a distraction from that bill.

More recently, the Senate passed a $15-billion jobs bill (HR2847) that, despite clear evidence of the job growth that clean energy development and tackling climate change could create, contained no measures related to these issues.

And on Pennsylvania Avenue, President Obama started the month by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies from his 2011 budget.  As the freed-up funds were to be directed to clean energy, this pleased a good many environmentalists and clean energy advocates.  The President then ended the month by announcing an $8.3 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear plants in Georgia and more funding for clean coal R&D.  Not as many environmentalists and clean energy advocates were as thrilled by that.

Searching for Meaning

So what does it mean when a chief executive, who understands the issues and is committed to a clean energy future, advocates markedly unclean measures?  It means that the idealism that attracted many voters to him is being umbrated by realism.  And that realism is being forced on him by a filibuster-based, virulently antipathetic Congress.  Perhaps Obama’s nod to nuclear is a concession to a state that habitually complains of having no clean energy resources of its own.  Perhaps his tentative embrace of clean coal research is intended to mollify the surprisingly large number of congresspersons who believe that our future is in coal.  And if all this posturing leads to an energy regime in this country in which carbon emissions are progressively reduced and clean energy solutions are seen as more marketable, it may not mean that we have turned the corner, only stepped off in the right direction.

Most of us know that that’s not enough.  The very least we should expect from snowbound Washington is a government that is not dysfunctional, even when it does turn up for work.