Climate Politics

Alaska Senator defends young constituent against Limbaugh’s attacks

Those of you who don’t read the comments under our posts may have missed this. Two days ago Nathan Wyeth brought news that talk radio gasbag Rush Limbaugh has been mocking a young Yup’ik Eskimo from Alaska who came to testify to Congress about the accelerating loss of her people’s traditional way of life due […]

America’s Climate Security Act goes before Boxer’s Environment Committee

Well, so much for enjoying Boxer's continued grilling. Early in the hearing, after one brief but blistering round of questions, she had to depart for votes on the Senate floor. She passed the gavel down to Joe Lieberman, who also had to leave, and down it went until it reached Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who closed up the hearing -- a brief one by Senate standards.

Sanders remains the only member of the committee asking serious questions about renewable energy. He pokes the most significant holes in the skeptic argument that drastically decreasing our carbon consumption will also drastically decrease our standard of living.

It's nice having heroes, but he needs more support.

Here are links to opening statements from Chairman Boxer (D-Ca.) and Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-Ok.) and testimony from the witnesses, submitted for the record:

America’s Climate Security Act goes before Boxer’s Environment Committee

Today is the first hearing on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill in the full Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Now that we're out of subcommittee, the expert witnesses aren't all cleverly selected special guests of the bill's authors. So we're hearing, right now, from people like Anne E. Smith, vice president of CRA International, which represents some, shall we say, unsavory anti-environmental companies.

This is not a mark-up hearing, so the bill won't be changing shape today. Events like this are in large part Kabuki theater -- events with the patina of a fact-finding mission, meant to provide members who already plan to vote "yes" or "no" on the legislation with the expert cover they think they need to do so. But there is, I suppose, the off chance that people like Smith and Dr. Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation will knock an on-the-fence senator away from supporting this or other, stronger bills.

More likely, though, it will just create an opportunity for Boxer to smack Smith around for not disclosing the fact that her company works on behalf of Arco, Haliburton, Exxon Mobil, and on and on, and for Jonathan Pershing of the World Resources Institute to make people like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) look like idiots.

Obama condemns mining reform package as too hard on the mining industry

Barack Obama is ticking me off. First he opportunistically attacks Clinton for not being enthusiastic enough in her support for corn ethanol — which he knows perfectly well is an environmental dead end. Then … this: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he does not support mining reform legislation that recently passed the House of […]

Seattle-area voters tied the knot

In the Seattle metro region, voters just sank an $18 billion transportation megaproposal that would have built more than 180 lanes miles of highway and 50 miles of light rail. But so far, the mainstream press has missed one of the most important stories of the year. The real story isn't tax fatigue, it's this: perhaps for the first time ever in the U.S., a critical bloc of voters linked transportation choices to climate protection.

In the run-up to the vote, a surprising amount of the debate centered on the package's climate implications. (The state has committed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and many cities, including Seattle, have been national leaders on climate.)

The opposition argued global warming. So did the measure's supporters. If you don't believe me, see, among others, the Seattle P-I (yes), The Stranger (no), the Yes Campaign, the Sierra Club's No Campaign, the right-leaning Washington Policy Center (no), and even the anti-tax/rail No Campaign, which oddly enough kept trumpeting the Sierra Club's opposition as a primary reason to vote no.

The turning point may have been when King County Executive Ron Sims suddenly withdrew his support. He cited the climate-warming emissions from added traffic as one of his chief objections -- he was thinking about his granddaughters, he said, not just the next five years.

The funny thing was, there was a heap of confusion and disagreement over the proposal's true climate impacts, mainly because no one had conducted a full climate assessment of the measure. But climate clearly weighed as a factor for a critical bloc of voters on both sides of the issue. In fact, Prop 1 may be the last of its kind, at least in the Pacific Northwest: a transportation proposal that lacked a climate accounting.

Obviously, there were more factors in play than just the climate. Taxes and traffic congestion mattered too. But what ultimately may have tipped that scales is that Puget Sound voters are reluctant to expand roads because they lock us into decades of increased climate pollution.

It's pretty well accepted that Seattle-area voters are receptive to environmental messages -- and in this case there were smart and well-informed greens on both sides of the debate. But green or not, the biggest problem for a certain segment of voters may have been that there was no comprehensive accounting of the climate impacts of the project -- one that included the roads, the rail, and the probable effects on land use.

So what's the lesson?

Max Baucus wrangles a sweet deal for Montana rural co-ops in the Lieberman-Warner bill

One bit of shenanigans that went on in the backroom negotiations over Lieberman-Warner was the effort by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to exempt his state’s rural electricity cooperatives from the bill’s tough emission reduction targets. Now the Great Falls Tribune has picked up the story: Montana’s senior senator inserted a provision into a climate change […]

Hillary Clinton struggles to explain away her previous opposition to corn ethanol

Over the years, Hillary Clinton has voted against subsidies and mandates for corn ethanol in the Senate a number of times. If you know anything about corn ethanol, you know that’s a good thing. When Clinton released her (otherwise excellent) energy plan this week, it contained a whole boatload of … subsidies and mandates for […]

How should the presidential candidates convey the issue of climate change to the public?

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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We've seen in Part I that the political climate is changing. How should presidential candidates talk about climate in the 2008 campaign?

My advice to the candidates is to love the global warming deniers and delayers to death and to handle the economic issue head-on. Invite them into constructive discussion. Elevate the dialogue. Emphasize without stopping or deviation that climate change is not a partisan issue, and it should not be a political issue. Talk about the massive new global markets awaiting innovative American technologies, about climate change as the next great challenge for the nation's genius, about how tackling climate change is our path to security and prosperity in the 21st century. It happens to be the truth.

Follow Barack Obama's example of truth-telling. He had the guts earlier this year to tell the Detroit Economic Club that we need to raise CAFE standards. He won praise from Time columnist Joe Klein this week for refusing to pander to voters.

Klein spent a day with Obama in Iowa and watched him handle a question about global warming. Obama talked about the need for a cap-and-trade regime to reduce carbon emissions, then said: "One of the themes of this campaign is to tell voters what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear ... So I've got to tell you there will be a cost to this -- and the utility companies will pass it along to consumers. You can expect a spike in electricity prices." Then he added the critical message: new technologies will eventually bring prices back down.

Obama also could have said this:

Lieberman introduces bill to designate Arctic Refuge as wilderness

Part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be designated as wilderness under legislation introduced today by Sen. Joe Lieberman and 25 colleagues. Wilderness designation for the 1.5-million-acre coastal plains region would rebuff seemingly nonstop attempts to drill for oil and gas there. Says Lieberman in a stroke of analogy genius, “America’s strength is not […]

A call for moral boldness (and decentralized grids!)

Over at Rolling Stone‘s blog, Tim Dickinson says of this video: It just may change your opinion about John Edwards — in particular about how compelling a combination it is to be both a Southerner and an unabashed progressive. He starts his bit on global warming about halfway in. Decentralizing the energy grid gets a […]