A Green Political Convention?

Nancy Pelosi(D, CA), Speaker of the US House of Representatives, is promising that this year's Democratic National Convention will be the most sustainable ever, according to this entry in the Washington Post campaign diary The Trail:

An Eco-friendly Convention Contest
By Juliet Eilperin

Despite the fact that their delegates will be traveling thousands of miles to attend their national convention in August, Democrats remain optimistic they will have "the most environmentally-sustainable Democratic Convention in history," they announced yesterday.
In order to ensure that happens, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and convention organizers have launched the "Green Delegate Challenge," which offers incentives to the delegation that does the most to offset its carbon footprint.
There's one significant payoff for those who compensate for the fossil fuels they burn along the way to the Denver nominating event: Delegations with the highest percentage of members offsetting their carbon impact get better seating sections on the floor of the Pepsi Center. Each delegate, alternate and superdelegate from winning states will also receive a limited-edition eco-friendly prize -- to be determined -- and convention organizers will update the public on the course of the contest on DemConvention.com.
Even if a state delegation doesn't win the prize, each delegate who offsets his or her travel gets a unique wearable "green item" to wear during convention week, so all their fellow delegates can know how virtuous they are.
"Colorado is going green in ways both large and small, and I'm proud to be a part of the effort to provide Colorado citizens and convention delegates alike the opportunity to offset our carbon footprint," said the state's Democratic governor, Bill Ritter. "Between the delegate challenge and its comprehensive greening initiatives, the Democratic National Convention can make an important contribution to our New Energy Economy."
One hint to the delegates: There's an easy way to win the contest without breaking a sweat -- stay at home, and vote for the presidential nominee by proxy. After all, that's the most eco-friendly move of all.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.

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Hillary Clinton on Mountaintop Removal

Hillary Clinton answered a question about mountaintop removal coal mining, a method that environmentalists have been trying to halt for years. This post in Dailykos provides context to her remarks, which appear below:

I am concerned about it for all the reasons people state, but I think its a difficult question because of the conflict between the economic and environmental trade-off that you have here.
I'm not an expert. I don't know enough to have an independent opinion, but I sure would like people who could be objective, understanding both the economic necessities and environmental damage to come up with some approach that would enable us to retrieve the coal but would enable us to do it in a way that wouldn't damage the living standards and the other important qualities associated with people living both under the mountaintop and people who are along the streams.
You know, maybe there is a way to recover those mountaintops once they have been stripped of the coal. You know, I think we've got to look at this from a practical perspective.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.

Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

John McCain's Environmental Confusion

Where does John McCain stand on environmental issues? The record is confusing, according to this article in The New Republic (excerpt below):

Trying to explain McCain's wildly erratic record on environmental issues is a maddening task. "We never know where he's going to come from," says Debbie Sease, the legislative director of the Sierra Club. "As a general rule, on land and conservation issues ... he tends to be pretty good. But he's a doctrinaire conservative on the role of government in protecting people from pollution." In his early House years, McCain was mentored by Morris Udall, an Arizona Democrat and conservationist. Soon enough, McCain was championing legislation to limit flights over the Grand Canyon and, as a freshman senator in 1990, snarling at senior Republicans to back down on local water issues.
But, when he wasn't safeguarding Arizona scenery, McCain usually held the conservative line, voting to hollow out clean-water and health protections or to expand offshore drilling. He also famously agitated for the construction of a controversial telescope atop Arizona's Mount Graham--which meant the razing of a forest containing an endangered species of red squirrel. When a Forest Service supervisor wanted to halt work on a road into the area, McCain was livid, according to a later investigation, threatening that, "if he did not cooperate on this project, he would be the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the history of the Forest Service."

In 1995, the Gingrich revolution swept into Congress and quickly set about trying to undercut the EPA. Once again, McCain stood with conservatives. But, the following year, after Bob Dole was trounced in the general election and GOP pollster Frank Luntz warned that half of all Republicans didn't trust their party on green issues, McCain penned a New York Times op-ed headlined "Nature Is Not a Liberal Plot," lambasting his fellow Republicans for their anti-environmental zeal. According to Frank Riggs, a former Republican representative who advised the senator in his 2000 campaign, McCain wasn't fundamentally at odds with the GOP goal of rolling back laws it saw as infringing on private property, but he did see a p.r. problem. "A lot of us were saying it privately, but he was one of the few willing to voice it publicly," says Riggs. "The Republicans could not be seen as anti-environment." McCain's gambit worked: The press hailed him as a kinder, gentler Republican in 1999, even as he was promising to repeal a Clinton-era ban on new roads in protected forests and skipping key votes on fuel-efficiency, wildlife, and mining bills.
The big exception to this pattern came after McCain returned to the Senate in the summer of 2000, still smarting from his primary defeat at the hands of Karl Rove. At the time, the odds of Congress acting on climate change seemed negligible: The Senate had denounced the Kyoto Protocol in a 95-0 vote, and Bush would soon renege on a campaign pledge to regulate greenhouse gases. On the trail in New Hampshire, McCain had been assailed by questions about global warming and dogged by an activist in yellow galoshes and a cape nicknamed "Captain Climate." Once back in Washington, McCain held the first balanced climate hearings in years starring real scientists (rather than industry-funded hacks). And, in private, Joe Lieberman convinced him that the United States risked losing its leadership position in the world if it didn't act. So the two senators drafted the first economy-wide cap-and-trade bill for carbon emissions and wrenched arms until the GOP leadership let it go to the floor, where, in 2003, it got 43 votes--far more than anyone had expected. "It was transformative: We went from Kyoto going down ninety-five to zero, and conventional wisdom saying nothing could ever pass, to a place where we had forty-three votes for a cap-and-trade regime," says Tim Profeta, a former Lieberman aide who helped draft the bill. Thanks in part to McCain, the political tectonics have shifted to the point where, today, a cap-and-trade bill is seen as inevitable.
But, just as McCain was becoming a celebrity in green circles--he graced the cover of OnEarth magazine in 2004, under the headline "Meet Captain Planet"--he swerved yet again. When McCain re-introduced his climate bill in 2005, he larded it with hefty nuclear subsidies, a poison pill that scared off environmental groups and lost four Democratic supporters. (Not all enviros are flatly antinuclear, but most would rather not see it heavily subsidized at the expense of other forms of clean energy.)
It's not clear why McCain sabotaged his own bill. One ex-staffer suggests that he thought he could lure Republicans like Lindsey Graham and Sam Brownback with a nuclear carrot, but miscalculated. (It didn't hurt that South Carolina, where McCain's first White House bid had foundered, is a big nuclear state.) And it's true that McCain isn't known for his deft legislative touch--one Senate staffer told me that McCain "totally screwed up the floor strategy" for a fuel-economy bill he sponsored with John Kerry in 2002.
Yet it's hard to shake the feeling that McCain may have been more interested in using global warming to burnish his maverick reputation than in passing legislation. "[T]he day-in, day-out negotiations you normally see--those weren't taking place," says Steve Cochran of Environmental Defense. Indeed, just last year, McCain refused to endorse a similar cap-and-trade bill sponsored by Lieberman and Virginia Republican John Warner--which actually has a shot at passing this year--just because it doesn't mention nuclear power. It's an absurd quibble for someone who thinks global warming is a colossal problem (the nuclear industry hardly lacks for subsidies as is) but a fine pose for someone who wants to be seen flouting conventional wisdom.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.

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Where the Candidates Stand on the Environment, Part II

In an earlier blog post I wrote about the stands that the three remaining major presidential candidates have on environmental issues. This article from Slate online magazine evaluates each of their positions (excerpts below):

With all the rancorous bloviation that's infected the Democratic race of late, it's easy to forget that Obama and Clinton are essentially kinfolk when it comes to policy. Sure, there are wonky differences between their stances, particularly on health care. But there are precious few discrepancies between the front-runners' eco-plans, both of which focus primarily on energy. If you're looking for reasons to favor one over the other, you'll need to drill exceedingly deep....

Overall, Clinton's plan is a little better on nitty-gritty details. The Lantern likes her specific shout-outs to plug-in hybrid vehicles and light-emitting diodes, as well as her adoption of Al Gore's idea for a federal agency (dubbed Connie Mae) that will facilitate the development of green homes. The plan's language is also more pragmatic than Obama's, with lots of emphasis on the phrase market-based in order to appeal to laissez-fairers and a whole section dedicated to explaining how the "green economy" will reinvigorate American industry.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to regard environmentalism as more of a moral obligation than an economic opportunity. He's shorter on specifics, particularly when it comes to financial breakdowns, but he discusses some pressing big-picture concepts—for example, the environmental consequences of urban sprawl, a phenomenon that has been encouraged by misguided tax incentives. And he gets points for thinking not just about energy, but also several issues near and dear to green-minded voters: As elucidated in this supplementary fact sheet, Obama's team hopes to tackle lead poisoning, toxic runoff from livestock operations, and sustainable solutions to Western drought....

McCain hasn't released a comprehensive environmental platform. All we can go by at present is this page from his Web site, which is full of sweet platitudes but woefully short on specifics. Given the lack of crunchiness among his base, McCain generally avoids any language that might smack of "Save the Whales" do-goodism. He instead favors variations on the concept of "stewardship," a catchphrase popular among admirers of Theodore Roosevelt as well as climate change skeptics.
Based on his record in the Senate, McCain seems mildly green.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Maybe She's Not His Type?

In case you have ever wondered, Karl Rove is not strong enough to be Sheryl Crow's man.

Enviromental activists Laurie David (wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David) and Sheryl Crow (gorgeous Rock Star) attempted to talk to Karl Rove about Climate Change at the White House Correspondents Dinner. All sides agree that the discussion turned heated very quickly. Apparently things really got nasty when Sheryl Crow laid her pretty little hand on Rove to try and prevent him from walking away and Rove snarled, "Don't touch me!" Here is an excerpt of the account the two women posted about the unpleasant encounter in the Huffington Post:

In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, "Don't touch me." How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, "You can't speak to us like that, you work for us." Karl then quipped, "I don't work for you, I work for the American people." To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, "We are the American people."

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.