Roy Neel, the fromer chief of staff to ex US vice president Al Gore, and is a former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, says US climate policy is dead in the water.

Neel, now adjunct Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is a visiting fellow with the University of Melbourne and is delivering a series of speeches on US climate policy.

He tells Climate Spectator that the US climate policy has become a victim of politics and the polluting industries, and its demise has very little to do with the facts of climate science. 

However, he predicts a change in atmosphere in Australian climate politics that will see the opposition Tony Abbott and others have generated begin to melt away, and the Gillard government's carbon pricing scheme serve as an inspiration to get the issue moving again globally.

Giles Parkinson: Can you give us an appraisal of where we are with climate policy in the US at the moment, because it seems confusing to the outsider?

Roy Neel: Well, I guess the place to start is exactly where we are today, which is dead in the water. Since the climate legislation died in our United States Senate last year, there’s been no effort, and for that matter virtually no hope, to revive it during the current session of Congress and before the Presidential election next year. And the window for enacting this legislation was realistically in the first year, year-and-a-half of the Obama administration. And when we didn’t get that done, that window closed, because now the Republicans control the House, they have… come closer to control of the Senate, and with the Presidential campaign underway, this issue seems to be receding into the background; with the exception of some in the Republican primary. Essentially the more conservative candidates, or more ideologically right wing candidates, have used this as a Litmus test for bashing anyone who supports action on climate change. So, that’s about the only action there is out there. Now, it’s currently all rhetorical.

GP:  Let’s just go back, then. Why do you think that Obama did not seize that opportunity in the first year-and-a-half?

RN: Well, I mean he did… he tried to advance the legislation during his second year in office. In the beginning of 2010 he began to put some weight behind this, as it appeared that the leaders in the House, Henry Waxman and others might be successful in passing the legislation. So, he did make an effort and he did talk about it. And in his first year and certainly late in his campaign, and right after he was elected, he said all the right things about this issue being of critical importance to the US and to the world and to mankind and to civilisation itself. He made some bold proposals and statements.

One of the problems was that the White House made a strategic decision to spend most of their political capital in the first year on health care reform and, by the time they got around to taking up climate change in the second year, their political capital had largely dissipated and their… political energy had been sapped somewhat too and ...by that time the Republicans had gotten their act together. They were in disarray the first year, which would have been an opportunity to move something. So, the sheer act of choosing health care over climate change relegated the issue to second tier and it made it possible for the Republicans to regroup and marshal massive new resources from the carbon industries to defeat [climate policy], whereas they may not have been able to do so in the first year.

GP: Can you explain why the Republicans are so anti this legislation? Is it ideological? Many of them now don’t seem to accept the science. Is it just ideological or is it just an economic rationale?

RN: Well, I think it depends on who you talk to. For every Republican who is opposing action on climate, you might get a different excuse. But it probably could be boiled down to three or four reasons. One is just purely political. If the President and the Democrats are proposing this, you’re against it. And that, unfortunately, is often the case today with politics in the US, within the Republican party. There are many members of that party who have made outrageous statements that their role is to defeat Barack Obama, defeat Democrats everywhere possible whatever the issue.

GP: That sounds like Australia!

RN: Well, I mean, it’s worse. It’s worse from what I’ve seen in my time down here. Now, that’s the kind of raw political part of the equation. The second is that they are in the grasp of the carbon industries, of the polluting industries. They either have an economic constituency that depends on fossil fuels to power their economy and therefore exercise perhaps disproportionate political influence, in places like Texas; and West Virginia, for its coal; and Louisiana for oil; and so on. So you have some of that where members of the Congress, the Senate, simply feel like they’re doing the work of their constituents who would feel more dependent on these fossil fuels. So, that’s another piece of it. A third piece is probably ideological, which is that we don’t want government messing with our economy. You know, let’s just let economic forces make these decisions and the government should just stay out of it. Now, that’s a fraudulent rationale, because government is already in this business, and it’s in the fossil fuel business with massive subsidies for oil; protections for the coal industry. All manner of subsidies exist, so it’s a phony argument… I mean it’s a subsidy for a competitor to our fossil fuels in terms of advancing renewable fuels.

GP: And, just on what you mentioned there about renewable fuels, the debate seems to have gone from climate policy to energy policy.

RN: Well, that’s true. And it was, to a certain extent, the inevitable way it was heading, because there seemed to be no stomach for enacting massive economic reforms to simply slow the effects of climate change. The opponents are funded by the fossil fuel industries. They did a good job of distorting the facts and misleading the American public that there was some doubt about the… about climate science. I mean the fact is that the overwhelming percentage, 98 per cent, depending on who you talk to, 98-99 per cent of all credible peer reviewed science – climate science – is firmly in the camp that climate change is underway. It’s caused by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels.

But those who would try to sabotage progressive climate change policy have simply, in many cases, just lied and they’ve put a lot of money behind that campaign. In the US, there are estimates from between $500 billion and $1 billion dollars of propaganda to try to sell the false idea of clean coal. There’s nothing clean about coal. And secondly, that the science of climate change is somehow in dispute. So, we’ve had that, and it's been very effective. And to a certain extent we may have been naiive in believing that the public had studied the issue enough and had simply accepted the fact that climate change, and the threat of climate change, is a reality.

GP: Well, I guess that goes back to some of the major public events. You worked on the Al Gore film “The Inconvenient Truth,” which had a huge impact across the globe. Looking back on that now, did it go too far, as some people have criticised, or did it not go far enough?

RN: Well, I think it was a remarkable documentary and it was the first time that a public figure took the extraordinary work of the climate scientists, to date, and turned it into an entertainment form that was digestible and understandable by the general public. Essentially, what Al Gore did was give a voice to all those extraordinary scientists that had been labouring on this issue for a very long time, and it had a big impact. I think it did spark the debate, and it certainly sent a message to anyone who would watch it and look at those numbers and think for themselves about this problem, that this is something we had better pay attention to. But it also woke up the carbon industries in thinking, oh wait a minute, our party may be threatened here. And their response was not to engage in a thoughtful debate about how to mitigate the effects of climate change, but rather we’ve got to shut them down.

We saw precedence of this in the efforts of the cigarette companies, the tobacco companies, in the US in the 1960s and early ‘70s – to try to discredit the health science about the effects of smoking. They spent years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince people that these reports from the medical field were just wrong, even going so far as to ramp up their advertising that one cigarette is healthier than another, and doctors choose this cigarette over another. It was scandalous! But ultimately, it didn’t work. Ultimately, it failed, and the same thing is happening now on a much larger scale, because the segments of our economy that make these huge profits off the mining of polluting fuels, the whole economy built around fossil fuels, they see that they have a lot to lose in the short term, and so they’re going to spend a lot of money discrediting the science behind this activity.

GP: But we do see, from afar, that there are significant corporate entities such as GE, Dupont, Boeing, Southwest Airlines and a whole series of utilities and other significant companies actually calling for action. So how does that balance out between some fairly big companies on one side, and a fair amount of grunt on the other?

RN: Well, you’re exactly right. Those companies you mention have, for varying reasons – either because they wanted to be ahead of the curve on climate change or that they just saw that it was in their own economic best interest – begun doing business a different way. Take, for example, Walmart, which wasn’t a leader in battling climate change, but figured out it was in their corporate best interest to start maintaining a different kind of business practices that would save them money – and there are a whole range of those, and they are all important and good for dealing with climate change. But what these companies have figured out is that, even if climate change does not turn out to be as threatening or as severe as the science now shows, these are things that are good for their businesses, because they represent more sustainable business practices. It means that, in the long term, they’re going to be there selling products more and making more money than the competition that just keeps its head in the sand.

But to answer your question more directly – why are these companies doing it and others aren’t? – many of the carbon-centric businesses, particularly the coal mining industry, the oil production industry, those businesses and those activities that have tied themselves so closely to the use of dirty coal for its manufacturing process, they just don’t see any incentive to change. They can make a lot more money simply putting off the reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions and keeping on making that money in the short term and let someone else deal with the problem – maybe their successor as CEO or the next generation of corporate figure. For that matter, the company may go in to the ground, but their fantastic earnings and profits and bonuses tend to be based on how much money they have made in the last quarter. And so, if that’s the case, you’re going to get a lot of short-term thinking and aggressive behaviour toward long-term solutions.

GP: What about the public debate then? It was  almost won I guess, at the time of “The Inconvenient Truth”. But it’s possibly been lost now – I don’t know whether you agree with that. If so, how does the debate get won again

RN: Well, it’s a great question. And the debate has become muffled, in part because in the US we still have a weak economy and the focus is understandably on job creation and improving our economic prospects and, in the case of voters, that’s really all they want to talk about and that makes it harder to push those messages through and to regain the microphone. And also there’s no policy initiative on the table in the US like there is here in Australia. I’ve been here 10 days now and it’s just quite extraordinary. The newspapers, the television shows, they’re all full of talk about the administration’s plan to put a price on carbon and all the things associated with that and it’s a large part of the public debate – and that’s reflected in the media, so people are thinking about this.

In the US, there is nothing like this. The closest thing to it, as I said earlier, is that it’s bandied about by… some of the right wing Republican candidates, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry and others who felt like this would be a way to energise Tea Party or conservative voters. But beyond that, there’s not much going on in the policy debate, so it’s harder to get this conversation going again in a big way. Having said that, the problems still exist and, in fact, it’s getting worse every day. So it’s unlike some issues where you have the fight – the political fight – you lose, and then you turn to something else and that problem then is settled. But it’s not settled in any way at all.

GP: Is there any prospect that Obama, if he was to be returned, would be able to address this issue in his second term? – because it's reasonably significant for the progress of international talks.

RN: Well, we certainly hope so. And that last point is critical, that if the US is going to exercise any leadership in the world debate on climate, then the US president is going to have to be passionately committed to this issue, and that will involve doing everything possible to advance the policy solutions in the US, to use his executive authority to start moving away from the use of fossil fuels, to regulate CO2 emissions where possible as he is intending to do through the Environmental Protection Agency; use every executive tool possible to advance us on the international public agenda. The problem that President Obama will have in a second term could be a Congress that will be closely divided between Democrats and Republicans or, even worse, will be controlled by the Republican party, both in the Senate and the House.

If that is the situation that Obama has, at least in his first two years of his second administration, his hands will be severely tied. It will be almost impossible to advance a climate agenda through the Congress to enact new laws with that kind of political profile in the Congress. We may be looking at another six to 10 to 12, 14 years before we see any appreciable change in formal US policy. The position and where you stand is one thing, and Obama has been pretty good at standing for doing the right thing, but leading a recalcitrant US Congress, and maybe even a sceptical public, toward this, that’s the mark of a courage and disciplined leader and hopefully this is what will come out of the election next year, if you get a re-energised president.

GP: Are you an optimist on this, or a pessimist?

RN: Oh, gosh. There’s always room for optimism. The past year-and-a-half have been devastatingly brutal to climate activists and their hopes have been bashed time and time again. And one of the most frustrating aspects of this is that climate legislation ultimately died not because Republicans killed it in the last Congress, but rather because we had 10 or 12 defectors among the Democratic senators who just didn’t have the guts to stand up on this issue.

GP: Why was that?

RN: Well, again, as we were saying earlier about what captures members of Congress on this issue, a few were in difficult reelection fights from fossil-centric locations. Some just may not have believed the science, frankly. ...Part of our naivety, I suppose, was that at least virtually all the Democrats would believe that this is the right thing to do, even if they had some challenges politically. But it’s possible that some of them didn’t even think that it is an important issue. Others, they just had no courage, no guts, no backbone – even though they may have known that it’s the right thing. I mean courage and leadership is easy when everyone agrees with you, but then when your constituents are yelling at you to do something, that’s not leadership really. But when you have elected officials who put their finger to the wind and feel a slight breeze against it and run to the other side, that’s something else, and it’s not an attractive quality – but we see too much of it.

The potential, now, for unlimited corporate campaign contributions to get you defeated and if your opponent has an unlimited amount of money, you’re in trouble, politically, no matter how popular you were in your last election or your election margin or whatever. You’re in trouble if, for instance, the Koch brothers – the right wing oil industry tycoons – if they decide they want to throw $10 million into your opponent’s race in the House just because they don’t like you and you’ve supported a climate bill, they can get you defeated, because they can essentially buy enough eyeballs and keep pounding you and saturating a media market with distortions, even lies, about your record. You’re going to be in big trouble and you can’t really counter that.

So, knowing that, I think sometimes members of Congress, even senators are loathe to get into these fights. So, we who are trying to expand public understanding of the threat of climate change and the need to act, we’ve just got to do a better job and we have to do more to build a grassroots effort to convince these politicians to do the right thing, or to convince them to do what they already know is the right thing. One of the things that Al Gore did a few years ago, which I think was unprecedented in environmental education, was he founded something called The Climate Project, to train people all over the world to give non partisan, fact-based presentations about the threat of climate change. And in the past five years he trained some four or five thousand individuals – again, all over the world, in about sixty countries and probably most successfully here in Australia – to give slide-based presentations to their neighbours and friends and workmates and so on, even at the local pub, to talk about these issues. And they weren’t political, they were simply a reflection of what the climate science was at the time or is at the time. And I think that's beginning to have an effect in places. And we have to do much more of it. We’re hopeful will grow and we’ll have that kind of peer to peer outreach that sometimes can be as influential, or more so, than just paid advertising on television.

GP:  And so, what’s Al Gore doing now?

RN: Well, just a couple of weeks ago he had a 24 hour world training program that’s a kind of updated version of “The Inconvenient Truth,” about the solutions to climate change, and had hundreds of thousands, millions of people all over the world logging in and getting this information. And in the last couple of hours he went on live to do that, so he’s still totally engaged in this. This is his life passion. Everything he does with his work life, with his business, is designed toward helping solve this problem, so he’s not going to go away. You may not hear as much about him for a lot of reasons, but he’s still out there, he’s putting his own time and money into the effort and doing whatever he can as a private citizen to move the world toward a solution here.

GP: And if the US can’t move, as you say, for eight, 10, 12 years, is the battle lost, or can the world still achieve something even without America being part of an international treaty?

RN: Well, you know, I think America is going to have to be a part of an international treaty, or it’s not truly international. And I think a number of things are going to happen. I think what’s going to happen in Australia over the next few weeks in your Parliament, and then with the new law taking effect and beginning to be implemented next year, I think some of the opposition that Tony Abbott and others have generated in the mining industries will begin to melt away, because it will become the status quo. And Australia, by the way, will be looked at as a leader. I mean, I don’t know if you know this concept of midterm elections: In the US there are very often elections that are held in between the formal election cycles, either somebody dies in office, they resign, or for whatever reason there is an open seat, and so in the middle of a normal term of office there is a special election. And American political watchers view those special elections with a large sense of interest that this is showing a trend since the last election. Well, the legislative action in the Australian Parliament, to enact a price on carbon and to create a financing system for renewable energies and set goals for emission reduction, that’s going to be seen as a special election worldwide and it will show a trend back toward action on climate.

Now, I’m not saying that that is going to immediately make the Republicans in the US Congress sit up and take notice and go vote on the climate bill, but it will send a message that will look like a reversal of a trend in policy making worldwide. And it could give backbone to those, both in the US and around the world, to say: wait a minute, Australia has done this, here’s a country of 20-something million that has enormous political constraints with the mining industry and they took the action and elected officials stood up and put their own careers at risk to do this. That might be inspirational. It might – but we hope it will be. And, you know, I may be like the little kid who’s looking under the horse manure for a pony, but I do believe that it presents a huge opportunity for activists around the world to seize on what Australia is doing to start moving this issue along again.