Climate Politics

Huckabee wins Kansas

Like the headline says. Wonder where he comes down on those coal plants.

Obama takes the stage in Seattle to rally support for Saturday’s state caucuses

Barack Obama's speech in Seattle today made this 26-year-old feel positively old. I and a few other Gristers hopped a bus over to the rally in Key Arena and were greeted by a stadium overflowing with supporters, many of them high school and college students. I overheard an usher say "I dont see this kind of support for [Seattle's basketball team] the Sonics anymore." (The venue holds 18,000 people: by speech time it was over capacity, with people crowded on the floor, spilling into the aisles, and climbing up the walls into off-limits box seats; several thousand had been turned away at the door.)

Georgia governor eases water-use restrictions

Despite an ongoing drought, and despite a recent court ruling that removes Atlanta’s right to much of a heavily relied-upon water source, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue is lifting a near-total ban on garden watering and swimming-pool filling in the state. “Swim, kids, swim,” said Perdue, who didn’t announce a start date for the eased restrictions. […]

‘Fix it or ditch it’

Here’s the new TV ad from Friends of the Earth, telling Senate Democrats to “fix or ditch” the Lieberman-Warner climate bill:

Notable quotable

“The [Lieberman-Warner] bill, as reported out of committee, would be the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the United States.” — an aide to Sen. Joe Lieberman

Boats float, bears don’t

Greenpeace: 27 years of getting arrested in the name of the planet, and still finding new ways to do it:

The next U.S. president will favor a carbon cap. What effect this has on the race is anyone’s guess.

Now that John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, the shape of the debate over climate change takes on different contours. Hillary and Obama are offering substantively similar climate plans, so there's no need to wait for the Democratic contest to be decided before we start gaming out a few scenarios.

1) Will climate change take on more or less prominence as an issue in the general election?

Argument for less: with everyone preaching from the same book, the media sees no hay to make. This suits the candidates fine. McCain knows the topic alienates conservatives. Hillbama knows their policy position makes them look liberal and McCain look independent/centrist. Under different circumstances, the Dem could have tried to portray the Republican as reactionary, but no longer. Everyone changes the subject to war and the economy.

Scientists write to Bush and Pelosi asking for biofuel-policy reform

In light of recent studies showing that biofuel production ain’t good for the environment, 10 prominent ecologists and biologists have written to President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking that the U.S. reform its biofuel-boosting policies. Seeing as the Bush administration has a track record of being very responsive to scientists’ entreaties, we have […]

Federal appeals court strikes down pro-industry Bush mercury rule

As Grist readers know, today a federal judge struck down the EPA's controversial mercury cap-and-trade system.

The decision (PDF) is just the latest in a series of successful court challenges to pro-industry Bush environmental rules.

This did not come as a shock. It has been commonly assumed in D.C. that the Bush administration's attempt to pretend that mercury is not toxic when it comes out of a power plant smokestack would be judged illegal.

Despite this decision, however, mercury cleanup will continue to languish, because the Bush crowd will continue foot dragging. Their gambit bought the industry an extra five years, at least.

The decision is a strong argument for Congress to step in and pass the power plant legislation introduced by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware.

Why John McCain isn’t the candidate to stop global warming

McCain's astonishing doubletalk on climate in the Florida GOP debate -- denying that a cap and trade system is a mandate -- made me start rethinking what a McCain presidency would mean for the fight to prevent catastrophic global warming. The more I researched McCain's views, the more I talked to others, the more I felt forced to change my previous view.

Salon has just published my long analysis, which concludes that while he would be vastly superior to Bush on climate ...

... a President McCain would not be the climate leader that America and the world requires. He is a conservative who happens to be on the only intellectually defensible side of the climate change debate. But he is still a conservative, and the vast majority of the solutions to global warming are progressive in nature -- they require strong government action, including major federal efforts to spur clean technology.

Of course, as I argue in my book, it is precisely because they know that the solutions to global warming are mostly progressive in nature that most conservatives are so close-minded on the subject. My basic argument is: