The urgent need for climate change bipartisanship

The climate change legislation signed by President Joe Biden this month was a historic political accomplishment and a big step forward in America’s capacity to help stop the warming of the Earth. Climate change threatens our security, our prosperity and even our freedom as much as terrorism did after 9/11. But like climate change bills I worked on in the Senate for years, it did not win bipartisan support. This needs to change. Until it does, the responsible and sensible course is to try to pass legislation with the votes of one party, which is what congressional Democrats just did.

Based on my experience as a U.S. Senator, I believe that the new law, the Inflation Reduction Act, was adopted along party lines not because Democrats refused to reach out to Republicans but because Republicans were not willing to get involved. Climate change is not a partisan problem so legislation to solve the problem should not be partisan. On every climate bill I introduced in the 1990s right up through early 2013 when I retired from the Senate, I sought and found an important Republican cosponsor, from Sens. John Chafee (R-R.I.) to John McCain (R-Ariz.) to John Warner (R-Va.) to Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). But each time one of our proposals came to a vote, almost all Senate Democrats voted for it and almost all Senate Republicans voted against it. And so, after almost 15 years of trying, we never got anything done. Not much has changed in the years since 2013. Democratic senators like Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) continued to work very hard to build bipartisan support for climate change action, and never get any.

The partisan split about such an urgent national and global crisis must stop. The fears of global warming are no longer based on scientific modeling but can be seen and felt by all of us in extreme weather, greater heat, more wildfires, stronger and more frequent storms, visibly melting polar ice and mountain snow, animal life moving to stay alive, crops threatened in their traditional ground, as well as sea levels rising.

I appeal to Republicans to see climate change not as a contest between different scientists or ideologies or interest groups, but as a clear and present threat to our way of life, just as terrorism threatened us after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The contrast between the partisan congressional response to the climate change threat and its non-partisan response to the terrorist attacks is sharp and hopefully instructive to Republicans in Congress.

In the work of Congress after 9/11 to create the Department of Homeland Security and enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to reform our intelligence agencies, there were many disagreements but almost none of them were partisan. That meant that we were able to discuss our differences (sometimes in passionate disagreements) and find a way to compromise so we could get something done to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11.

And we did.

That is exactly what Republicans and Democrats must now do about climate change. The threat is real. The law that just passed will help a lot, but there is much more that our government will need to do to avoid future climate-caused disasters. This will be done best if members of both parties are working together to find solutions.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 2013.