The Political Climate: an ongoing commentary on the NH Primary and Climate Change

Look for national leadership on climate change issues and you find…a vacuum. This probably isn’t news to you. What are making news are the efforts by states and local communities to fill the vacuum left by Washington and drive energy and climate change policy. The past two weeks have highlighted some of these actions, on large and small scales and on both coasts.

In California, on the heels of a historic cap-and-trade agreement with Great Britain, the legislature of the world’s sixth largest economy has passed a bill requiring a 25-percent cut in carbon dioxide pollution by 2020 and Gov. Schwarzenneger has signed it into law. California has enough economic weight that this policy will have national implications. Juliet Eilperin’s Washington Post article has Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.) stating that the vote is a “giant step toward a national cap…It’s only a matter of time.”

From the largest state in the country we turn to the town of Hancock, New Hampshire (population 1,739). Volunteers in Hancock sought to gather the signatures of 25 registered voters to place a climate change resolution on the March 2007 town warrant. After six hours of petition work they had gathered 319 signatures. Citizens in Barrington, Conway, Newmarket, and Exeter met local volunteers with similar enthusiasm. These are just the earliest stages of local efforts across the state to bring global warming to town meeting in March of 2007 and signal the widespread concern about climate change in the Granite State.

Want more? Less than two weeks ago, more than 500 citizens marched into Burlington, Vermont to raise awareness about global warming. In South Carolina (another early primary state), Republicans are warning presidential hopefuls to come ready to explain their energy policy in detail. These are but a few examples of citizens being way ahead of elected officials on climate change and energy issues. Stay tuned.

In an interview in yesterday’s New York Times, scientist James Lovelock, an environmental icon and creator of the “Gaia hypothesis,” painted a pretty grim picture of the scope of climate change impacts in the relatively near future - and advocating nuclear power as the solution.  Being that it’s “Science Wednesday,” TPC will neatly sidestep the oh-so-divisive nuclear question for the time being, and instead focus on the following obervations offered by Dr. Lovelock, in response to a query about the lack of political will for adequate policy solutions:

“I think it’s mainly because scientists, and I include myself amongst them, have not really understood what was going on until very, very recently. And also scientists tend to look at things much too academically.

“What really got me to write the book [his newest,  “The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity”] was going to a meeting at the Hadley Center, a big climate lab near where I live, and talking to all the people there. And Sandy came with me, and we both got the impression that they were talking about the Earth as if it was another planet, not something they were actually standing on.

“And they’re all talking about their own separate little bit. One was talking about glaciers melting, another about tropical forests in trouble. But they didn’t put it together as a whole-planet phenomenon. And when you did that, then each of their gloomy stories together became a devastating thesis.”

Indeed, we are seeing reports about more and more of these “separate little bits” - including, just in the past week, news of threats to plant species, rising ocean temperatures (see yesterday’s post), and melting permafrost (ditto.)

So, the question we leave you with is this: is it scientists’ responsibility to aggregate their separate pages or chapters - the hurricanes, the glaciers, the ice core records - into one coherent climate story? If this is the magic missing piece needed to translate scientific knowledge into an urgent push for action - where do we get that piece?

The Washington Post ran an interesting article exploring the attitudes of America’s youth concerning the environment, compared with the amount of attention our federal government devotes to the issue.  Authors Laura Wray and Constance Flanagan analyzed data from a federally funded national survey, “Monitoring the Future,” which has tracked attitudes, behaviors and values of high school students since 1976.  Results from this study illustrate that “environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time.”  Given US failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol or to mandate any national regultations on greenhouse gas emissions, it is perhaps not very surprising that “youths’ willingness to conserve gas, heat and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980’s.”

An interesting conterpoint to the Post article and “Monitoring the Future” study was a recent CBS poll demonstrating that for the first time ever “the environment” was ranked the issue of greatest concern for young people; moreover, 81% said it was important that substantive steps be taken now to address global warming. The poll was commissioned and released by MTV, which launched a “Break the Addiction” energy/environment campaign last spring and then last week announced a partnership with the national youth-led Campus Climate Challenge; said Challenge has already engaged over 300 US and Canadian campuses on issues of climate change and renewable energy since its fall ‘05 inception - and plans to introduce energy initiatives at over 450 colleges, universities and high schools by the end of May 2007.  [Full disclosure: Clean Air-Cool Planet is a coalition partner of the Campus Climate Challenge.] 

These youth, who are leading the charge for carbon neutrality within their lifetimes, clearly did not get the memo regarding the link between federal apathy on the environment and their own.  That said, the question of a conservation ethos - as opposed to reliance on new renewable technologies to make conservation unnecessary - is an interesting one; most student activists are campaigning for wind or solar purchases, not more efficient boilers or dorm energy restrictions…

On a related note, today Foster’s ran an article reporting on Monday’s European and Asian pledges to collaborate on efforts to set new carbon dioxide emission standards that will go beyond the Kyoto Protocol’s 2012 deadline.  Opinions of the 25 EU and 13 Asian leaders were reflected in a statement made by Finnish Prime Minister, Matti Vanhanen: “The choices we make today will affect the whole world tomorrow.”

Many recent scientific findings, such as these from the Boston Globe and these from USA Today, confirm such sentiment.  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports an “84 percent chance that human-induced climate change was responsible for most of the ocean warming,” warming that they say is adding to the heightened intensity of hurricanes and storms.  USA Today reports on the rapid melt of the permafrost in Siberia, releasing once trapped methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, calling it “a kind of slow-motion time bomb.”

And, the obvious question, where is the United States in all of this?  As in the case of the Kyoto Protocol, we are not involved - giving our youth one more reason to hop in their gas-guzzling SUVs intead of opting for their carbon-free bicycles.  We can only hope that with a growing number of their peers, they will indulge in that classic youth pastime - rebellion against authority - and begin to eschew the model provided them by the federal government where climate change is concerned.

PoliticsNH’s Steve Kornacki had a chat with Maggie Hassan, from which he draws some conclusions about John Kerry’s apparent second attempt at the presidency. Maggie was an early supporter of Kerry in the state and Kornacki credits her with helping his comeback effort. He cites her as one of a number of local Democratic candidates with whom Kerry enjoyed a “mutually beneficial partnership” in 2004.

That partnership is explored from a different angle in this column from the Nashua Telegraph’s Kevin Landrigan in the wake of the first round of campaign finance reporting. As hinted at above, presidential candidates invest in the campaigns of local candidates either directly or through the state parties as their end of this symbiotic relationship. The effect, in part, is that the number of state senate candidates spending over $100,000 on their campaigns has risen sharply.

One of the stranger consequences of our first-in-the-nation status is that national political figures get drawn into local elections and bring with them the money that pays for the glossy mailings that fill our boxes this time of year. Paging Granny D…