Political stat man extraordinaire Nate Silver has pegged West Virginia Senators Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller as among 9 “problematic Democratic votes” as Senate leaders and President Barack Obama try to find a way to get the 60 votes needed to block a filibuster on the landmark global warming bill.
On his fivethirtyeight.com blog, Silver analyzes possible Senate votes on the legislation using a model with several variables, including lobbying contributions, per-capita carbon emissions in each state, and ideology, to attempt to explain how lawmakers might vote. Using similar methods, Silver predicted 401 of 431 House votes on the bill correctly.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a helpful commentary on Silver’s study, and here I’ll just give you a rundown on what Silver projected for Byrd and Rockefeller.
Silver projects that the Democrats need to get find seven votes somewhere out of this group of 9 problematic senators:
Will Byrd or Rockefeller be any help in passing the bill? Here’s what Silver said:
If the Democrats could swap, say, Rockefeller and Byrd for two seats in Arizona, the going would be significantly easier on this issue. Byrd in particular: let’s face it — it’s not clear how many more votes Robert Byrd is going to cast in the Senate period, and at the end of the day, I don’t see one of his final ones being something that could significantly impair the coal industry in West Virginia. The path of least resistance to 60 votes probably lies elsewhere. Rockefeller, though, voted aye on cloture on last year’s bill and is probably attainable.
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Who are the two or three Republicans in the yes category?
More interesting will be the demands Democrats make to commit to the bill.
I keep seeing messages from the big environmental groups to “strengthen and pass” Waxman Markey. This drives me crazy. First, strengthening didn’t happen in the House and it ain’t gonna happen in the Senate. Second, what, specifically, does the environmental community see as essential for a successful bill? What are the things that have to go back in or can’t be taken out? That goes unstated. Is the environmental community willing to draw a line somewhere in the sand, or is any bill acceptable?
My line in the sand? The bill can be a waste of money, it can be ugly, it can keep farmers farming the government and coal dependent on subsidies, but it has to make real reductions in emissions without a lot of collateral damage to the environment. I’m not convinced that you can say that about Waxman Markey.
I’ve always said a climate bill should be effective, fair and politically tenable. You’d like 2 of 3. Right now we only have the latter, and there’s reasonable chance the bill will not only be ineffective but will actually increase emissions. The offsets may not really be effective, there will be indirect increases in emissions from the expansion of bio-fuels and the elimination of the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon point sources (big new power plants) or demand performance standards will let significant new sources come on line.
On the latter, the Sierra Club announced today that it had blocked 100 new coal plants. Sure, construction costs have had a lot to do with it, but the Sierra Club has used EPA authority to regulate carbon emissions from new sources to block permitting. 400 million tons of CO2 a year–about 1/5 of current US coal-plant CO2 emissions, have been kept out of the air. No offsets, those are real reductions.