WASHINGTON — In mid-spring, when the prospect of a global warming bill passing Congress seemed like an Al Gore pipe dream, President Obama invited Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) down to the Oval Office. "He realized that this was a very tough bill to get through," Waxman remembers.
At a time when some still saw Obama as too inexperienced to adapt to Washington's backroom ways, Waxman found the president perfectly ready to accept the only strategy that offered hope of success: Sitting down with each group affected by the bill and trading concessions for support.
That strategy yielded a narrow victory in the House on Friday. The question was, did Obama, Waxman and other supporters give away so much in the process that the benefits to the environment ended up being slim to none -- especially since the bill now goes to the even less sympathetic Senate?
"There's a point at which you've got to ask yourself, what are we doing here? What's the point?" said Elaine Kamarck of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who was a Clinton administration official and advisor to then-Vice President Gore.
So far, most of the major environmental groups are sticking with Obama. Most groups calculated that, in sum, the bill was worth moving, said Emily Figdor, the federal global warming policy director for Environment America.
"We think there's a lot of problems in the bill," she said, but "we need to take that first step. We're so long overdue."
If the bill makes it to the president's desk, said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the measure's co-author, "we will have fundamentally changed our relationship with energy and how it's generated in this country."
"There is a new political recombinant DNA," he said, "working with business and consumer interests to create a pathway that works for both. This bill demonstrates that."
Even before Obama was inaugurated, Markey and Waxman had begun meeting with industry groups and others to feel them out on the issue.
In addition to farm groups, they talked to oil and natural gas executives, coal producers, officials of manufacturers and others who could face higher energy costs -- which could be passed on to consumers.
The goal of the bill they were drafting, embraced by Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as one of his top priorities, was to establish government mandates and regulations that would ratchet down U.S. greenhouse gas emissions quickly and dramatically, through a "cap and trade" system of buying and selling emissions permits.
