How the Clean Air Act convinced me to support Rudd’s stupid ETS

I just read a great article at Grist.org by David Roberts, about the old Clean Air Act in the USA. It governs air pollution and has had a significant impact on acid rain and the ozone layer – and it took years to get right. Part One describes how the bill got passed and strengthened, Part Two discusses the lessons we could learn from it in our fight against climate change.

Henry Waxman, the Representative who is currently trying to get  a climate-change bill passed in the US Congress, is the guy who was responsible for the Clean Air Act being such a success. I reckon that if he’s managed to have a win before, against the huge opposition he faced in Congress and from big business, he probably knows something about getting good work done.

How did Waxman get the Clean Air Act to where it is today?

He was patient – he just kept working on the issue, a bit at a time, until he reached his goal. And he didn’t hold grudges – he allied himself with whoever was willing to do a deal, even if they’d opposed each other on previous issues.

But here’s the bit that interests me today: Waxman didn’t sacrifice good (or even mediocre) legislation for the sake of a perfect solution that might not ever happen. The original Clean Air Act was pretty weak, and everyone said it’d cost businesses too much to implement the changes. But once it was in place, and people saw it didn’t cost as much as corporations said it would, he was able to get it strengthened to the point where it is today. Nowadays, people wouldn’t hear of industrial plants going back to their old sulfur-spewing ways.

Waxman realised that once you’ve got a system in place, it’s hard to get rid of it. As Roberts puts it, “Progress is rare and hard fought, but it’s usually durable”. You can tinker with the legislation, change the rules and where they apply, and all the details. But the new system isn’t going away, and people will learn to live with it to the point where they can’t imagine not having it anymore.

And so we get to my point…

Rudd’s Carbon Polluters Reimbursement Pollution Reduction Scheme is pretty crappy. I’d prefer a stronger ETS, or a carbon tax, or a raft of pollution-regulation, or just about any damn thing that would work better than his random collection of political wedges. But the CPRS is what’s on offer, not any of those things. And once it’s in place,  then we can get to work on making it better. I think we need to follow Waxman’s lead here, and take whatever we can get.

We won’t get to sit back and relax with a perfect carbon-reduction plan, our lives all secured from the ravages of climate change. We’ll have to keep working on it, keep pestering the politicians to remind them who they work for, keep doing deals. But if we do, we’ll get what we want in the end – a bright green future for Australia.