On May 3, 2007, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski realized that the plan was working.More at the link.
That morning, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), then a presidential contender, attached his name to a model piece of climate legislation that sought to bring U.S. carbon emissions down by an ambitious 80 percent by 2050. Not to be outdone, a few hours later, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) hastily announced she’d support the same bill.
And with that, climate issues seemed — at long last — to have departed the realm of idealism and entered the more fruitful arena of politics, with its results-driven rules of engagement. Environmentalists would no longer have to appeal to politicians’ best instincts by promising they’d be saving future generations and doing the right thing for the globe. Instead, climate activists could draft more-persuasive allies of the electoral variety: fear, ambition and self-preservation.
“It really became a competition. That was the beauty of it,” recalled Karpinski. “This became an issue where they were competing to see who was the best.”
Yet as green activists converge on the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, their sense of disappointment is palpable, even with the eleventh-hour decision by President Obama to attend the summit on Dec. 9. What was seen in the heady days of 2007 and 2008 as the likeliest venue for a new international agreement on carbon emissions now caps a year of mixed results. While the American political system has, in many ways, seen a total transformation in its capacity and willingness to tackle such a transcendent issue, some of the traditional obstacles remain — primarily the age-old laws of partisan politics and the limits on how much ambitious legislation Congress can absorb at one time.
See also, James Delingpole, "Climategate goes uber-viral, Gore flees leaving evil henchmen to defend crumbling citadel."
Image Credit: The People's Cube, "Obama: Shovel-Ready on Lenin's Birthday / Earth Day."
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