The Center for Public Integrity

In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama pledged nothing less than a transformation in the way America uses energy in order to “save our planet from the ravages of climate change” and reinvigorate a troubled economy.

Specifically, the president asked Congress to send him legislation “that places a market-placed cap on carbon pollution.” The new president has pledged to set annual targets that put the nation on course to an 80 percent reduction (from 1990 levels) in fossil fuel emissions by 2050. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she plans a floor vote on climate change before December, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said late last week that he would attempt to bring a global warming bill to the Senate floor by summer’s end.

But while the Obama team readies to take on the global warming challenge, the special interests that seek to derail, blunt, or tailor any new climate policy to their narrow agendas have already gathered in staggering numbers. A Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms shows that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year, as the issue gathered momentum and came to a vote on Capitol Hill. That’s an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress. It also means that 15 percent of all Washington lobbyists spent at least some of their time on global warming in 2008, based on a tally of the total number of influence-peddlers on Capitol Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics.

A sampling of power players:

With the global economy in meltdown, and faith in Wall Street wizardry at a low — to say the least — it’s perhaps an odd time for a push to put the fate of the planet into the hands of the market.

But that’s the solution for fighting global warming already in practice in Europe, and the one with the most traction in Congress and the White House. When President Obama, soon after the election, promised “a new chapter” in American leadership on climate change, he said, “That will start with a cap-and-trade system.”

In cap-and-trade, Uncle Sam would either hand out or sell tradable “permits” that would allow power plants and other businesses to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and no more. The idea is that the permits would become a valuable commodity, and companies that can cut emissions quickly can profit by selling their permits to companies that are having a hard time. It’s a way of giving businesses flexibility, while creating incentives for innovators to figure out the lowest-cost solutions.

The idea of creating a “carbon market” is based on the hugely successful 29-year-old program that curbed U.S. acid rain pollution far more quickly and cheaply than industry anticipated. But the acid rain market deals with only one pollutant — sulfur dioxide — and one kind of polluter: the coal power plant. Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases like methane are so much more prevalent that an effort to limit them would involve every sector of the economy.

“It’s the most important thing we have never done,” Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton said in a recent speech. Within five years, he anticipates that a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates — from livestock and corn to oil and natural gas. “I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market. The largest commodity market in the world.”

Public transit advocates were almost nowhere to be found when the Senate debated climate change back in 2003. But today, transit agencies and their allies are among many new players jumping into the climate debate, as the stakes grow higher, and the prospective benefits — a cleaner world and cold cash — grow clearer.

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that last year at least 25 transit groups, cities, and counties engaged in climate lobbying focused on public transit.

Measures to reduce transportation emissions are a growing part of the climate change debate on Capitol Hill. “Between [2003] and now I think what you saw was a clearer understanding of transit’s role in reducing greenhouse gases,” said Paul Dean, director of government relations at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). “We began to get some traction in the latest debate [in 2008].”

Environmental Protection Agency figures show that the transportation sector — cars and trucks, mostly — accounts for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So any climate change legislation will probably aim to get people out of their cars and on to mass transit, be it trains, light rail, or even buses.

But close observers of the debate say transit advocates are concerned not just with doing good, but with doing well. Under the “cap-and-trade” concept at the core of most legislative proposals, the federal government would raise billions in revenue by selling emissions “permits” to private companies; some of those billions would then be doled out to projects that could reduce greenhouse gases, such as mass transit projects.

The Center for Public Integrity compiled its climate lobby database from lobbying disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate’s Office of Public Records. In 2008, electronic filing was mandatory for the first time, making it possible to search documents by key words. The 2008 lobbyists include all who registered to represent clients on “climate,” “global warming,” or the bill numbers and terms associated with the Climate Security Act sponsored by Senators Warner and Lieberman. Center researchers then individually pulled the 2003 disclosure records of each of the more than 770 companies and organizations that lobbied on climate in 2008, to see if they also were represented on global warming five years earlier, when the Senate voted on the bill sponsored by Senators McCain and Lieberman. Center staff also examined 2003 records of energy companies that later merged or changed names.

Each of the lobbying records was categorized to show the industry sector (manufacturing; mining and coal; agriculture) or group of interests (environmental and health) that best reflect the company or organization being represented. In the chart showing number of lobbyists by sector, lobbyists who had more than one client are counted in each sector that they represented. As a result, the totals of lobbyists in the sectors add up to a greater number than the total number of individual lobbyists.

To come up with the best estimate of spending on climate lobbying, the Center examined each disclosure record and coded it to reflect whether the lobbyist was hired for representation only on climate policy or on multiple issues. If the lobbying expense was reported only as “less than $5,000,” it was not counted. To avoid double-counting of outside lobbyist expenses, the Center took into account that organizations that employ in-house lobbyists must include the costs of outside lobbyists in their quarterly reports.

The Climate Change Lobby is generously supported by a grant from the Deer Creek Foundation and is part of an ongoing investigative series on “clean coal” and climate change policy issues.

In addition, organizational support for the Center is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Popplestone Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and many other generous institutional and individual donors.