Climate Politics

A look at Tom Tancredo’s environmental platform and record

Update: Tom Tancredo dropped out of the presidential race on Dec. 20, 2007. Environmental and energy issues don’t seem to be top priorities for Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo. He rarely mentions them on the stump and he doesn’t highlight them on his campaign website. When he does talk about his vision for America’s energy […]

An interview with Tom Tancredo about his presidential platform on energy and the environment

This is part of a series of interviews with presidential candidates produced jointly by Grist and Outside. Update: Tom Tancredo dropped out of the presidential race on Dec. 20, 2007. Tom Tancredo. Photo: VictoryNH Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo — best known for his zealous opposition to illegal immigration — bills himself on his campaign website […]

Three reasons Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

Conservative carping aside, Al Gore is a perfect candidate for three reasons:

1. The award has always gone to people who have done more than just promote "peace," such as Albert Schweitzer, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa.
2. The award has recently (2004) gone to an environmental leader, the great Wangari Maathai, who "founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental nongovernmental organization, which has now planted over 30 million trees across Kenya to prevent soil erosion."
3. Global warming is a grave threat to future peace and security -- as more and more experts are acknowledging. Global warming creates the possibility of millions of refugees, spurred terrorism, sea-level rise, and food and water shortages -- water being a major source of conflict. Indeed, climate change may already have been a key factor in the Darfur crisis (see here and here).

If we avoid catastrophic global warming, Al Gore's tireless efforts to educate the nation and the world will be a major reason. He will have prevented untold humanitarian crises and countless regional conflicts. Gore would bring honor to the award.

Judge delays work on border fence per insufficient environmental report

The Bush administration tried to “ram” through an insufficient environmental report and must temporarily cease work on a 1.5-mile-long section of fence on the Arizona-Mexico border, a federal judge ruled yesterday. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle agreed with the Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club that federal agencies’ three-week-long environmental assessment seemed unnecessarily hurried, but […]

Edwards would auction 100 percent of pollution permits; welcomes Obama to the auction fold

Earlier this week, when Barack Obama released his excellent new energy plan, I said this: … with his promise to auction 100% of cap-and-trade credits, Obama has put himself out ahead of all the other frontrunners. He deserves the praise he’ll get for it. John Edwards. Photo: kk+ via flickr Afterwards, the John Edwards campaign […]

The Republican candidates acknowledge climate change, but they don’t much care about it

All the action and excitement around climate change policy seems to have lulled Chris Mooney into a false sense of security about the current crop of Republican presidential candidates. This, however, is no time to go soft, and no time to give points for showing up. Bare acknowledgement of the reality of climate change is […]

How should the environmental movement spend its money?

Tonight will witness the biggest social event of the D.C. environmental calendar: the Green Corps 15th anniversary bash. All the green glitterati will be there to honor Rep. Ed Markey and John Lewis with awards -- and more importantly, to raise money to support training organizers for the environmental movement.

I've been helping out with the event for the last few months and I'm excited about it. It's made me reflect on how much the environmental movement has changed since I graduated from the year-long Green Corps organizing fellowship in 2002 -- and think anew about the relative importance of organizing to other methods of achieving social change.

For those who don't know, Green Corps is the field school for environmental organizing. It generally takes 20-35 recent college graduates (out of more than 800 who apply!) and trains them in all the basic skills that go into running and winning an environmental (or really any social change or political) campaign. Then you get sent out somewhere in America to lead an environmental campaign yourself, working under the banner of a local, state, or national environmental group. My first campaign, for instance, was to work with Greenpeace to secure $5 billion in financing from the California government for clean energy financing. It's a lot more responsibility than most people think they'll have right out of college, and when you win, as you often do, it's hard not to embrace organizing for the long run, as most Green Corps organizers do. As a result, they've gone on to do amazing work with everyone from the Sierra Club to Move On and the Gulf Restoration Network.

During my Green Corps year from 2001 to 2002, though, organizing was almost all we had. It was difficult for national environmental groups to get big-time media coverage of any environmental issue, much less the climate crisis, which seemed to be going nowhere as long as President Bush was in office. Now, since An Inconvenient Truth hit movie screens, it seems like everything is media: whether you read Women's Wear Daily, watch NBC or Fox, or read your local paper, the planet is hot, hot, hot!

That change has had a huge impact, altering the spectrum of what's possible: we no longer have to beg for crumbs or think up cartoonish stunts to get attention (though no one should estimate the power of a cartoonish stunt to get attention). Suddenly, even Republican presidential candidates are forced to address the climate crisis and Democrats in Congress are actually considering fairly ambitious climate legislation. People across the country are making small changes to their own lives that might add up to something. More importantly, politicians at every level are more willing to give pro-environment legislation time on the agenda.

Here's why I keep coming back to organizing -- and think the environmental movement needs to continue to focus on building its long-term organizing capacity rather than becoming overly enthralled with a pure media approach:

New developments in WTO fisheries subsidies negotiations

Some new ideas by Brazil and Argentina during the Doha round negotiations at the World Trade Organization have left me feeling rather optimistic about the ability of the WTO to actually help address one of the world's biggest environmental problems: global overfishing.

Their proposal is a real attempt by developing countries in the ongoing negotiations about fisheries subsidies to establish some rules to prevent countries from subsidizing their fishing sector without regard to the fish!

The proposal still needs work. But finally, leadership by the developing world to try a find a workable approach to ensure that development keeps the best interest of marine life and habitat in mind while also tending to the needs of people.

LCV declares Sen. James Inhofe a target for unseating in 2008

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe (R) is the first person to make the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list of congresspeople the group hopes to unseat in 2008. Inhofe is the minority leader on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, despite having called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”; […]

Yet more musing on Lomborg and S&N

Looks like I'm not the only one who sees a scary similarity between the messages in their respective books, Cool It and Break Through.

The San Francisco Chronicle just ran a double review by Robert Collier, a visiting scholar at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. The review ends pointedly:

[T]he arguments of Nordhaus and Shellenberger attain an intellectual pretense that could almost pass for brilliant if their urgings weren't so patently empty. The closing chapter calls for "greatness," but, like the rest of the book, it offers little in the way of substantive proposals to back up its rhetorical thunder.

Perhaps that's for their next book. Or perhaps real solutions, rather than pretentious sniping, are not the authors' purpose. Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like Lomborg, will get plenty of attention in Washington from those who want to preserve the status quo. But for those who recognize the urgent need to transform the national and world economies and save the planet as we know it, they are ultimately irrelevant.

Precisely.