This past Thursday, a day that should live in infamy, the U.S. Senate manifestly utterly failed to move forward on comprehensive, clean energy and climate legislation.  This failure isn’t just about some abstract, “inside Washington” political game.  To the contrary, it’s painfully real, with severe consequences for the United States of America and its citizens, starting immediately. 

Before we talk about what action we need to take now, let’s look at what we’re losing by failing to act.  According to NRDC Action Fund Executive Director Peter Lehner, the consequences of the Senate’s “abject failure” – at least to date – include:

*”failing to invest in job-producing clean energy”

*” failing to secure us from despotic regimes that sell oil”

*”failing to confront runaway global warming”

Peter Lehner concludes that the U.S. Senate is “fiddling while Rome burns,” and he’s absolutely right.

With regard to jobs, let’s be crystal clear what we’re talking about here.  According  to NRDC Climate Campaign Director Pete Altman, the Senate’s failure this past Thursday means we will forgo creating 1.9 million jobs, “according to independent analysis by the University of California and further substantiated by a literature review by Third Way.” That’s a lot of jobs — good jobs, made in America, and very difficult if not impossible to “outsource.” Instead, the Senate’s failure this past week means that those 1.9 million jobs are going elsewhere – to China, to India, to Germany, pretty much anywhere but here.  All thanks to Senate #FAIL.

On the national security front, the Senate’s failure last week means that petrodollars – which, let’s not forget, know no boundaries in the fungible, world oil market – will continue flowing to countries like Iran, which would have lost approximately $1.8 trillion worth of oil revenues over the next forty years if a comprehensive climate bill had passed Congress. Instead, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad will continue indefinitely to enjoy $100 million per day in oil revenues he can spend however he wants – also, courtesy of Senate #FAIL.

Last but not least, with regard to “runaway global warming,” the news from the U.S. Senate this past Thursday means that this problem is now far more likely to continue and even worsen. In addition to the usual litany of melting polar ice caps, mass extinctions, and threats to human health and well being, you can now add running out of water to the list. 

…NRDC and Tetra Tech released a major new report [Wednesday] showing that more than 1,100 U.S. counties – over one out of three in the lower 48 states – will face water shortages by 2050. As we found, if warmer-temperatures due to climate change continue to rise, well, the effects are enough to make your mouth go dry:

At this point, it’s likely that you’re looking for some uplifting, encouraging words to conclude this blog post.   Unfortunately, I don’t have any.  Instead, the truth is that we’re in bad shape, with this blatant capitulation to special interests – the coal industry, Big Oil, the forces of “business as usual” and the status quo – coming at the expense of everyone else who inhabits this planet.  In sum, the Senate’s failure to act — despite the forces lining up to do so as they almost never have before in our history — means a poorer, dirtier, and more dangerous world for the foreseeable future.   It also means that we have squandered enormous opportunities that would have flowed from passage of a comprehensive, clean energy and climate bill.  As Tom Friedman wrote the other day in the New York Times:

Can you imagine how high the stock market would soar and how easy a compromise with Democrats would become if Republicans offered an energy policy consistent with their values and our interests? What if the G.O.P. said: We will support a carbon tax provided one-third of the revenue goes toward cutting corporate taxes, one-third toward cutting payroll taxes for every working American and one-third toward paying down the deficit.

Instead, barring a miraculous turnaround in the U.S. Senate – perhaps pushed by a mass uprising among the grassroots, aka “the people” - none of that will come to fruition in 2010. Instead, as David Roberts of Grist writes, “at this point, American government appears to be broken. And our children and grandchildren will suffer for it.”  That’s all the result of Senate #FAIL, and nobody should be under any illusions that it’s anything other than that — for the time being, anyway.

Having said all that, and as discouraging as this all might be, we can’t give up.  We’ve got to keep fighting, not just to move the ball forward, but just as importantly, to stop misguided Senators from attempting to move it backwards.  We may not win today. We may not win this year. But eventually, we will win, because the overwhelming scientific evidence is on our side, and because in the end, this planet is the only one we’ve got.  The bottom line is that everyone needs to spend some time in August — while the Senate is on recess — making sure that their Senators know that inaction is unacceptable.  The other side will be at work in the summer heat; we must be, too.