“Every time Senator Lieberman would open his mouth, Bayh would show him the map.”
You should read Ryan Lizza’s latest New Yorker opus despite what I’m about to say. The piece runs close to 10,000 words, but much of this story of “How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change” can be extrapolated from just 137 of those words:
Lieberman knew that the issue was almost as much regional as ideological. When he went to lobby Evan Bayh, of Indiana, Bayh held up a map of the United States showing, in varying shades of red, the percentage of electricity that each state derived from burning coal, the main source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States. The more coal used, the redder the state and the more it would be affected by a cap on carbon. The Northeast, the West Coast, and the upper Northwest of the country were pale. But the broad middle of the country—Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois—was crimson. (Indiana, for example, derives ninety-four per cent of its electricity from coal). “Every time Senator Lieberman would open his mouth, Bayh would show him the map,” a Lieberman aide said.
Fascinating and dispiriting all at the same time.
Politically, what a map. Journalistically, what a detail.
