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Last year, a campaign in Maryland to pass the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction bill in America flamed out. Here’s the story of the agreements and compromises made behind the scenes to turn last year’s crash into this year’s victory lap.
The lobbying last year started with great fanfare. Flanked by environmentalists at the State House, Governor Martin O’Malley proclaimed that the state needed to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent by 2050. The alternative to switching to cleaner energy, the governor said, was that humans cease to exist as a species.
The mostly Democratic coalition expected – and received – strong opposition from industry and skeptical Republicans. But the real reason for the bill’s overwhelming defeat last April was an unexpected lobbying attack from an O’Malley ally: labor unions.
The United Steelworkers led the charge against the climate change bill, worried that the Sparrows Point steel mill, a paper factory in Western Md., cement manufacturers and brick makers would be shut down.
Jim Strong, a local leader of the steelworkers union, feared that the bill would require the replacement of high-pollution coal with cleaner fuels that cost so much the factories couldn’t compete.
“To make steel, you need coal. Without coal, it’s like making cake without flour. Okay? So coal is a primary product in the manufacturing steel,” Strong said. “In some cases, we had companies telling us they were just going to have to shut the plants down and ship business to other locations.”
Mike Tidwell, an author and founder of Chesapeake Climate Action Network, was among those on the losing end of the lobbying battle.
“There was some version of a train wreck that happened last year between the unions and the environmental community,” Tidwell said. ”When organized labor came out against the climage change bill last year, it was saddening. We had not done our jobs, we had not reached out to all the meaningful players. And the environmental community realized that it had a lot of work to do.”
After the legislative session was over, Governor O’Malley’s administration leaned on the antagonists to work out their differences with the help of a professional mediator. It was like marriage counseling that ended with a glass of budget-friendly Shiraz instead of divorce papers.
Over the fall and winter, unions, environmental advocates, manufacturers and others held a series of sometimes tense meetings in the Baltimore offices of the Maryland Department of the Environment.
After long hours and midnight deadlines, just before Christmas they agreed on a revised bill. It sets a more moderate goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 25 percent by 2020 and exempts manufacturers. The state will consider 42 options to reach this goal, including expanding mass transit, pushing energy conservation, insulating homes and businesses, planting trees along streams and supporting “buy local” foods campaigns.
During the long and difficult meetings, the environmentalists and union leaders forged what they called a “blue-green” alliance.
“It’s just like a marriage,” Strong said. “Look, I don’t agree with everything my wife says. But we agree most of the time. And I’m sure she’d say the same thing about me.”
As part of this alliance, the unions switched sides and this spring lobbied for the greenhouse gas bill. With union muscle, the legislation galloped through the Maryland Senate and passed the House last week.
Now the blue-green power couple is off to Washington, to lobby Congress for national legislation to reduce global warming pollution.
Tidwell, the climate change advocate, sees victory in achieving what was practical in Maryland – and making partners with unions and manufacturers for the more important national battle.
“You had the lions and the lambs all lying down together in a way that had never happened before,” Tidwell said. The manufacturers and unions “are on paper now as saying that global warming is a reality, that sea level rise is happening in Maryland, that’s is a problem…In the past, that has not been the case.”
The bill doesn’t solve the global warming problem, but it is an important step forward. That’s the view of Dr. Cindy Parker, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and author of a recent book “Climate Chaos: Your Heath at Risk.” She said exempting manufacturers from the Maryland’s bill doesn’t hobble the legislation, because factories contribute only a small amount of the state’s total global warming pollution -- about 4 percent, according to the state. About 70 percent comes from electricity generation or transportation.
“I still think it’s a good bill,” Dr. Parker said. “But it also illustrates again why we need federal legislation so badly to make sure that greenhouse gas emissions will be able to be reduced to the extent necessary to stabilize the climate.”
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