A funny thing happened to the promise made by the COP28 environment conference to “transition” away from fossil fuels. You know, that’s the stuff that makes most of our cars go.
It went out the exhaust pipe when it encountered the recent U.S. defense spending bill that will lay out tens of millions for a new parking garage at Bath Iron Works.
The international community has set a target of limiting the increase in the world’s temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-global warming level. According to science, if this limit is not achieved, the quality of life on Earth is harmed. Accomplishing this goal requires a reduction in the use of fossil fuels and their eventual elimination.
The most effective way to cut gasoline usage is to drive less. Replacing private vehicles by mass transportation, including car pooling, would cut down on total auto use and emissions that cause global warming. Yet federal money is used to encourage private vehicles instead of developing more and better mass transit facilities.
At the same time as the U.S. advocated the fossil fuel phase-out, the defense bill was enacted to promote motor vehicle usage. Politicians may talk a good game, but they prefer to cater to our immediate wants instead of our long-term needs. That’s not how leadership is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, in reality, building a new BIW parking garage to encourage commuting does not conflict with the COP28 outcome. Its so-called transition from fossil fuel includes a raft of ready-made excuses for not making the goal. Besides, the transition would only deal with energy production. It doesn’t touch motor vehicles.
COP28 took days of negotiation to come up with just the right language that could both make it appear that the world cared about global climate change and satisfy the oil producers who hovered over the proceedings. The supposedly successful result showed how clever diplomacy works to produce words without action.
Not only was the defense appropriations bill backing the garage right in line with this do-nothing policy, but the bill itself represented much of what’s wrong with politics in Washington.
The federal budget consists of three parts: mandatory, discretionary and interest. The mandatory portion accounts for a majority of the budget and covers Social Security, Medicare and other
statutory programs. Interest includes the payments on government debt incurred to cover outlays that exceed tax revenues. Discretionary spending has two elements: military and non-military.
The defense spending bill covered the military piece. It was supported by a majority of each party. The basic political promise of almost all candidates is “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and the bill helps them keep that promise.
The bill is like a Christmas tree, with something under its branches for every state. Congress often tries to gift wrap items that really have little to do directly with national defense and include them, because the passage of this bill is a virtual certainty. This is done by limiting them to the defense establishment.
The costs of BIW garage might ordinarily be covered by the company, the state or the city or all of them together rather than by taxpayers across the country. Of course, Mainers pay for such benefits to other states.
Under the Democrats, Congress had tried to keep military and non-military spending roughly equal. After 9/11, Republicans successfully trimmed non-military outlays while enhancing military funding.
The multi-faceted military budget is contained in a single bill, making it possible to enact questionable items, safe in the knowledge that few in Congress will want to risk seeming to oppose defense.
The garage is a good example of moving some non-military spending into the better protected part of the budget. Spending that might be challenged in non-military bills and even labeled as socialism is not disputed when it is targeted at defense personnel.
The GOP insists that non-military spending should be covered by many separate bills, making it easier to target cuts in programs similar to those that slip into the defense bill.
The defense spending bill united both parties, though extreme liberals and extreme conservatives joined in voting against it. Surprisingly, many of them shared the same reason for their opposition. They wanted to halt the authority of the federal government to spy on communications by Americans.
While the vote on the defense bill looked like a rare case of bipartisanship, broad support for military spending has never been in doubt. The political risks of opposing it are too great and the benefits for all states are too tempting. The government’s surveillance authority would have to be reviewed later.
In the end, both COP28 and the defense spending bill were hailed as victories in the self-congratulatory statements of the people who made the deals. Perhaps they hope we won’t look at them too closely.
Gordon L. Weil formerly wrote for the Washington Post and other newspapers, served on the U.S. Senate and EU staffs, headed Maine state agencies and was a Harpswell selectman.
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