GW In and Out of D.C.
May 25th, 2007 by Carbon CoalitionSome time next month House Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard will present Nancy Pelosi a plan that will make the House of Representatives carbon neutral by the end of the current Congress. Every year the House, the Senate, and other supporting agencies, emit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by 57,455 cars–that’s pretty significant. But making attempts to become carbon neutral in the biggest House in the country is a much more significant (and symbolic) effort than just the act alone. In a speech to the Senate last month, Sen. Kerry said “we need to lead by example on the environment by setting a bold goal of making our Capitol and Congress energy efficient and fighting for clean coal and renewable sources of energy.”
Speaking of D.C., this article explains Rep. Ed Markey’s motivation for getting members of the new House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming ”out of Washington, D.C., where concern about this issue has lagged.” And NH was the obvious state of choice to host a global warming summit on June 4th. According to this article from the Associated Press, Markey chose NH because “about 160 towns adopted a resolution earlier this year calling for action to address climate change.” Granite Staters certainly are not lagging on this issue. Hopefully the summit’s location–on top of Cannon Mountain with a backdrop of the White Mountains in Franconia Notch–will ignite the same spark under Committee members as it did to NH citizens.
Yesterday a FOTPC was in on a meeting with former Presidential candidate Gov. Tom Vilsack who was on a “green tour” of the Seacoast as a Clinton surrogate. How much can you take away from this kind of event? In keeping with the green theme, Vilsack talked a little about Sen. Clinton’s general environmental policy views with a few specifics (carbon cap and trade, for example). The questions, with the exception of one about healthcare, focused on global warming. Vilsack defended the cap and trade concept as superior to a carbon tax and understood the need for both incentives and a larger perspective to get citizens and local governments active in reducing their carbon footprints. How much of this was Vilsack and how much Clinton is an open question. By the way, Scott Spradling was in the room and one wonders if he noticed that the majority of the questions from NH citizens focused on global warming. If so, maybe he would consider adding global warming to the list of candidate issues on the WMUR website.
