Articles by Joseph Romm

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.

-----

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:

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.

-----

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."

New report examines the impact of climate change on national security

John Podesta and Peter Ogden of the Center for American Progress have written a chapter titled "Global Warning: The Security Challenges of Climate Change," for a report called "The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change." They describe their work as follows:

Pollution prevention and preparing for the future

The final part of "MidEast Oil Forever?" (subs. req'd) discusses pollution prevention.

I think the discussion still holds up, and as you can see, I am no Johnny-come-lately to the global warming issue. What is particularly sad about the Bush administration, is that while they eschew the anti-clean-technology rhetoric of Reagan and Gingrich -- indeed claim to be pro-clean-technology, they have gutted some of the best clean tech and energy efficiency programs. In particular, they have slashed the budget for the Energy Department's major pollution prevention effort, the Industries of the Future program (described briefly in the article), and the president has proposed zeroing it out entirely.

This administration's energy and climate policy make the final sentence of this article, sadly, as true as ever: "Only a misbegotten ideology could conceive a blunder of such potentially historic proportions."

Here is what we wrote: