You would not think it if you were judging the world by the quality of the work of the US Senate – scary thought – but there has been considerable progress made on confronting the climate crisis: from the EU’s (relatively) hard-charging approach, to the rapidly growing attention to clean energy and other clean tech in East Asia, to the work of the US states as evidenced, among other things, by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the Northeast and the Western Climate Initiative (WCI). The WCI’s principal participant, California, is the eighth-largest economy in the world.
The linchpin of California’s considerable efforts to control greenhouse gases and promote clean energy is AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. You would not be surprised, unfortunately, to learn that there is a vigorous effort, funded primarily by oil interests, to cut AB 32 off at the knees. On November 2nd, the voters of California will consider Proposition 23, to suspend AB 32. The NY Times reports here that some of the money to pass the referendum is coming from the Koch brothers, key supporters of the Tea Party movement. (For a recent exposé of these two relatively invisible bulwarks of the right wing – and their self-serving motives – see Covert Operations from the superb journalist Jane Kramer at The New Yorker.)
Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, is quoted in the NYT article that the referendum is “by far the single most important ballot measure to date testing public support for continuing to move to a clean energy economy.” The Governator is working to defeat the proposition, as he considers AB 32 an important legacy of his. If California, which has often represented the best, first and smartest in environmental protection and renewable energy, sends AB 32 down, then that will be a bad signal. I have a good feeling about this, though. I think Californians generally, of whatever political stripe, truly embrace the environmental ethic, and will see through the prevarications of the oil companies and reactionary demagogues supporting Proposition 23.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports here that the Republican party – the Tea Party types and what’s left of the “moderate” wing – are campaigning this Fall, in lock step, against cap-and-trade and even against the blisteringly stark reality of climate change. “The strong Republican front against established science includes entrenched Senate leaders as well as the new wave of radical conservatives endorsed by the Tea Party activists…” The Center for American Progress characterizes these Republican candidates as “climate zombies.” The one Republican running this Autumn who had worked in Congress for climate change legislation, Mike Castle, was defeated in his primary race for the Senate by a Tea Party candidate.
At the same time that these Republicans are running hard against a clean energy economy and the facts of warming, the tree-hugging, left-wing Democrats at Deutsche Bank have just issued a paper refuting the major claims of the skeptics. “The paper’s clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the skeptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat.”
I’ve lived through some scary times in this country, but the regressed state of the Republican Party today is, in a word, terrifying. Yes, I’m a Democrat, but there used to be grown-ups like John Chafee, Jim Jeffords, Theodore Roosevelt IV and William Reilly who had some influence with their party. No more.
UPDATE: A couple of days after my original post, there was an articulate lead editorial in the NY Times on The Brothers Koch and AB 32.
