Climate Politics

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 […]

Climate change mitigation is related to building democracy and decreasing poverty

While the climate change "issue" is covered frequently in the press and is implicitly or explicitly part of the U.S. presidential campaign, for developing countries it is just one of many pressing issues. For the man on the street, at least in many of the countries I visit, climate change is important but not urgent.

The same could be said of many other issues, of course, but what distinguishes climate change is that it is perceived as "an act of God" on which individual actions have only minimal impact. Unless it is linked to issues of social justice, energy security, economic growth, and the aspirations of a growing middle class in developing countries, support for action on climate change will remain pegged to the fortunes and attention of environmental liberals in the developed North.

While on a recent trip to Pakistan, shortly after the Nobel Committee's Peace Prize announcement, I asked several people, "What do you think of Al Gore and the climate change issue winning the Nobel Peace Prize?" or alternatively, "What do you think climate change means for you and Pakistan?" Even to me these questions seemed ridiculous given what's going on in Pakistan -- especially the events of the past week, whenpa a U.S.-sponsored general showed what kind of friend he is to democracy. Answers ranged widely, from a sophisticated intellectual who had attended a viewing of Al Gore's film as part of a film discussion club, to people who had heard of Clinton but not Al Gore, to a few who said they had never heard of climate change.

I looked in vain for any mention of climate change in the opinion pages of local newspapers, and while there was vibrant debate over important international issues (e.g., the nature of democracy, government ineptitude, pollution, poverty, the U.S. playing kingmaker, and energy shortages), there was nothing on climate policy. (Aside, that is, from glowing mention in a few blogs of the fact that one Pakistani national, Professor Adil Najam at Tufts University in the U.S., is a member of the IPCC and thus partial recipient of the Nobel Prize -- read his blog here.)

A handy tool to find your ideal presidential candidate

I’ve got my ’08 candidate all picked out, but if your chad’s still hangin’ (so to speak), try out this handy tool to match you up with your ideal presidential candidate. It’s like those multiple-choice quizzes in Cosmo, but with less sex. Need more info on the candidates’ energy plans and environmental positions? Check out […]

Asbestos legislation watered down, disappointing activists

Public-health advocates who in June praised legislation to ban asbestos now say the version passed by the Senate last month was watered down so significantly that they no longer support it. Thanks in large part to industry lobbying, many products containing cancer-causing asbestos wouldn’t be banned under the new version of the bill. Sen. Patty […]

Drug-addicted philanderer mocks civically engaged young Alaskan

We already knew that right-wing commentator Mark Steyn of the National Review enjoys belittling children's health problems and that right-wing bloggers attacked Graeme Frost's family when he spoke up for children's health insurance. But it seems that being mean to kids is becoming a kind of bizarre hobby of the right-wing media.

This weekend, 5,500 students from across the nation came to the nation's capitol for Powershift 2007, the first national youth summit on climate change -- and the solutions to it. Yesterday, upwards of 3,000 people packed into the offices of members of Congress to press them for action to stop climate change with clean energy development that'll create 5 million new green-collar jobs. More on that in a later post.

Representative Ed Markey invited five young people to testify before the House Select Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence, one of which was 18-year-old Cheryl Charlee Lockwood, a Yup'ik Eskimo from the community of St. Michaels on the Bering Sea. (Footage available here.)

Here's what she told the committee:

Will climate change become the hottest issue of the presidential race?

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

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In addition to his Oscar and Nobel Prize, Al Gore may be in line for the title of Prognosticator of the Year. Last January while I was attending his training program in Nashville, Gore predicted that by the time of the 2008 presidential election, climate change would be the hottest issue in the race.

That prediction hasn't come true yet, but things are moving that way. Climate change is emerging like a tropical storm building to Category 5. It may become the issue that most clearly defines the candidates' courage, vision, ability to unify the nation, and willingness to be honest with the American people.

"The most remarkable thing about the environmental debates taking place in this year's presidential campaign is that they're occurring at all," Time magazine reported this week. "Once the stuff of a few hug-the-planet bromides in green states like Vermont and Oregon, the environment is one of the hot topics of the 2008 campaign."