CLIMATE CHANGE? AN ISSUE FOR LOSERS

Ross Douthat nails it in his NY Times blog post-mortem:

And nobody, but nobody, cared how many millions liberal billionaires spent trying to make climate change an issue.

Andrew Restuccia notes in Politico:

For Tom Steyer and other environmentalists, $85 million wasn’t enough to help Democrats keep the Senate blue or win more than a single governor’s mansion in Tuesday’s toughest races.

The billionaire’s super PAC and other green groups saw the vast majority of their favored candidates in the battleground states go down to defeat, despite spending an unprecedented amount of money to help climate-friendly Democrats in the midterm elections.

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News:

This was one of the dogs that didn’t bark in the 2014 election, even after liberal billionaire Tom Steyer spent an estimated $70 million to promote the issue and a new U.N. report Sunday warned of “severe, pervasive, and irreversible” global warming that will worsen without environmental policy changes.

Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University, said a GOP-led Congress is more likely to try to stop Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency from imposing new regulations on power plants than endorsing any additional steps to reduce U.S. carbon pollution. Said Brulle: “I am not an optimist about us doing anything – I think it looks bad for political action on climate change in any way.”

The Keystone pipeline appears to have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, according to the National Journal:

Following an election night that saw anti-Keystone Democrats replaced by pro-Keystone Republicans, the oil-sands pipeline project now appears to have at least 60 supporting votes. That means legislation forcing approval of the long-delayed project may be headed to President Obama. Before the election, at least 57 senators could be counted on to support pro-Keystone legislation, but that was never enough to beat a filibuster from the project’s opponents. . .

And none of the 57 seats that were held by pro-Keystone lawmakers were surrendered to anti-pipeline newcomers.

That ought to harsh Tom Steyer’s mellow.  I say make him spend it all in 2016.  After that perhaps he’ll go back to investing in coal plants again.