An Auto Insider Takes on Climate Change

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And now the people want to fight global warming. According to Dingell, his shift from skeptic to activist has two explanations. "The scientific evidence is now generally accepted as being clear," he said. "The other thing that has transpired is that there's a public acceptance that something has to be done. And you'll remember that we work for the people."

Those aren't the motives that have Capitol Hill buzzing, however. Insiders wonder if Dingell has been riled up by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with whom he has a long-running feud. Over the years, Dingell has opposed her rise to party leadership. She, in turn, backed another member of Congress, Lynn Rivers, when Rivers was forced by redistricting to run for Dingell's seat. That was in 2002, but Dingell still savors the drubbing he gave Pelosi's friend. So bad blood was pulsing when the Democrats took the reins of Congress this year and Pelosi appointed a select committee to remove global warming from Dingell's grasp.

No protégé of Rayburn's would ever willingly give up jurisdiction over a lunch menu--let alone the biggest bill in decades. Dingell flexed the muscle of a half-century and rallied his fellow committee chairs against this infringement of prerogatives. The select committee was promptly neutered. "John is the quintessential congressional chairman, protecting his jurisdiction while often reaching to grab someone else's," according to Leon Panetta, who chaired the Budget Committee before serving as White House chief of staff. "The last thing he wants is to lose jurisdiction."

Dingell scoffs at the idea that intramural combat is the root of his new attitude. "I think the select committee is going to be as useless as feathers on a fish, and they're either going to be in my hair or at my feet," he grumbled. But he insisted that he isn't motivated by mere annoyances.

In fact, he was moving even before Pelosi acted, he said. Within days of the Democratic victory in November, he had summoned a former member of his committee to return and testify on global warming. "Albert!" he barked sternly when former Vice President Al Gore came on the line. "I'd like you to come in."

The Gore hearing was quickly followed by sessions with leading scientists, auto manufacturers, power-company executives, economists and others. Energy and Commerce Committee chief of staff Dennis Fitzgibbons--lured back to Dingell's side after a lucrative stint as an auto-industry lobbyist--describes the "steep learning curve" for members of Congress, who have arrived, one by one, at "their holy [expletive] moment, when they say, 'Wow! This is bigger than I thought.'"

Behind the scenes, Dingell has delivered offer-you-can't-refuse messages to industry. "I've said, 'Fellas, the factual issue appears to be resolving itself. Work with me. I will do everything I can to get you a bill that you probably won't like--but with which you can live. And if you don't, you will have a bill that you won't like and can't live with." When the ceos of General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler testified in March, Big John demanded yes or no answers to a series of questions that boiled down to just one: Are you working with us or against us? With varying degrees of pain on their faces, each one promised to cooperate.

But the devil's in the details. And any serious climate-change legislation will be a forest of details. The key feature of any Dingell bill will be a mandatory cap-and-trade system modeled on Dingell's 1990 acid-rain legislation. Industries would be allowed to emit fixed amounts of greenhouse gases according to their share of the overall problem. If a power plant or factory reduces its emissions, the saving can be sold to plants that fail to adhere to the cap. In this way, reductions become valuable and pollution costly.

Easy to say but fiendishly difficult to execute in a world where carbon emitters range from coal-fired power plants to the backyard grill. "How many sources of carbon dioxide are we talking about?" mused Fitzgibbons. "How do you allocate the amounts? t's a geometrically complex arrangement."

Europe's carbon cap-and-trade system is off to a poor start because too many permits were issued by governments trying to protect their own industries. On the other hand, too few permits could cripple the American economy.

Many economists and environmentalists prefer a straightforward tax on carbon emissions, with proceeds going to fund research and development of alternative energy. It's much simpler--but economists don't run for re-election. House Democrats with long memories recall the whipping they took for backing a similar tax in the Clinton era. The so-called BTU tax was one reason the party lost control of Congress in 1994, and they don't intend to repeat the experience. As Dingell dryly noted in a recent speech, "Many members of Congress remember only too clearly the letters B, T and U."

Even tougher is the one perplexing area in which the fight against global warming conflicts with the U.S.'s goal of greater energy independence: coal. "The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal," Dingell recently declared. We have seemingly endless tons of the stuff, which can be converted into liquid fuel for cars. Coal boosters are pushing legislation through Congress to subsidize the use of coal instead of oil. The only problem: coal is the dirtiest source of greenhouse gases. Representative Rick Boucher, from Virginia's mining country, chairs the subcommittee on energy, but coal's influence goes further than that. Twenty-seven House Democrats hail from coal regions--a deeply meaningful number when Democrats control the chamber by just 16 votes.

The problem is so big, tangled and fraught that some House members prefer to let the Senate take the lead. After all, if Senate Republicans could be lured into a filibuster against a climate-change bill, they might hand the Democrats a strong issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. Dingell, who calls the Senate "a constitutional mistake," wants nothing to do with that strategy. Nor does he have any sympathy for environmentalists who believe the best thing to do is delay action until a Democrat wins the White House.

When both right and left, big business and the ultragreens are worried about what he's up to, call it a Dingell moment. He doesn't like ideologues. Extreme purity annoys him. "I write legislation from the middle," he explained. "I want to build a bill that will have broad bipartisan support that will have the public's confidence." And finally, "a bill that can be signed by the President."