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

Before Christmas, LCV was complaining that the media elite were dissing climate change and presidential politics.  If Russert, Stephanopoulos, and Couric won’t listen to LCV, maybe they will follow in the footsteps of one of their peers: The New York Times.

The New York Times editorial board decided to take a look at the candidates’ climate change positions in yesterday’s editorial “The One Environmental Issue.”  The editorial found that in past years Democratic and Republican strategists believed that climate change was “too complicated and forbidding an issue to sell to ordinary voters” and therefore was not an issue in 2000 or 2004 elections, but now they say, “the times have certainly changed.”

Of the Democrats, the editorial now says:

“Still, the country is a long way from a comprehensive response equal to the challenge. That is what the Democratic candidates are proposing. Senators Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, former Senator John Edwards, Gov. Bill Richardson and Representative Dennis Kucinich have all offered aggressive plans that would go beyond the Senate bill and reduce emissions by 80 percent by midcentury (90 percent in Mr. Richardson’s case), much as called for in the United Nations reports.

Internationally, the Democrats say they would seek a new global accord on reducing emissions to replace and improve upon the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Winning agreement among more than 180 nations will be slow-going, so several candidates, including Mrs. Clinton, have suggested jump-starting the process by bringing together the big emitters like China very early in their administrations.”

Two months ago, The New York Times first highlighted “the GOP Divide” on climate change after Mike Huckabee joined John McCain as the only Republicans to endorse a cap on carbon emissions.

This Times editorial described McCain as “authentic pioneer” in the senate on climate change, and “The other leading Republican candidates — Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee — talk about energy issues almost exclusively in the context of freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil. All promote nuclear power, embrace energy efficiency and promise greener technologies. Only Mr. Huckabee has dared raise the idea of government regulation, embracing, at least theoretically, the idea of a mandatory cap on emissions. The rest prefer President Bush’s cost-free and demonstrably inadequate voluntary approach, which essentially asks industry to do what it can to reduce emissions.”

When so much of the campaign news is focused on anything but the actual issues, it is refreshing to finally see national coverage of the climate issue and the presidential campaign.

The Christmas season allowed Granite Staters many things: a festive new batch of sappy candidate commercials, two days without candidate events, another Patriots win, but most importantly a chance to compare and contrast the slight differences between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani’s climate change proposals.

The major climate policy divide still remains in the GOP with John McCain and Mike Huckabee as the only two GOP candidates favoring a domestic cap-and-trade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  But a slight difference persists between Romney and Giuliani, specifically concerning their views on U.S. involvement in an international response to climate change.

At a Hopkinton town hall this weekend, Giuliani vehemently opposed caps of any kind stating, “I like pursuing energy from positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement.  I never think that it works when government puts on too many taxes, mandates, or burdens.”  Giuliani’s only mention of working internationally on climate change was his desire to sell efficient and alternative technologies to developing countries like India and China.  Typically when the topic arises, Giuliani quickly launches into an attack of the current Kyoto Protocol.

Giuliani’s reluctance to talk about international agreements is in contrast with Mitt Romney, who is speaking more and more about possibly joining a new Kyoto-like agreement.

On yesterday’s The Exchange Romney stated, “I do believe that we can work with other nations of the world to consider the widest array of options to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.  There are a number of different pathways to do so and caps are one.”

Laura Knoy followed up by directly asking Romney, “If there were a Kyoto-type protocol that did include China and India, would a President Romney sign it?”

Romney responded:

“If it includes the entire world and it is a fair inclusion of those other nations, of course I would sign on, but there is a very big gap.  They are going to say that they want to continue to grow dramatically, and they want us to reduce, and we are going to have a difficult time.”

Romney is not definitively stating that he will actively pursue a global treaty as president, but he is clearly more willing to join the international community in a climate agreement than is Rudy Giuliani.  Again, Giuliani believes that selling efficient technology to the developing world will sufficiently reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to avoid global warming.

Listen to Giuliani in Hopkinton

Listen to Romney on The Exchange

Yesterday’s GOP debate moderator Carolyn Washburn asked the candidates to raise their hands if they believe climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity.  Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani were the only four candidates to raise their hands.

“I’m not doing hand shows today,” Fred Thompson objected and said that he needed a minute to explain.

McCain quickly jumped in:

“Let me put it to you this way: Suppose that climate change is not real and all we do is adopt green technologies which our economy and our technology is perfectly cable of. Then all we’ve done is given our kids a cleaner world.  But suppose they’re wrong and climate change is real and we’ve done nothing. What kind of a planet are we going to pass on to the next generation of Americans?  It is real.  We can do it with cap-and-trade, with capitalist and free enterprise motivation.”

Giuliani weighed in on the science:

“Climate change is real. It’s happening. I believe human beings are contributing to it and the way to deal with it is through energy independence…and I think that our party should embrace this as an issue for us.”

Romney was eager to jump in and share what has become his global warming catch phrase:

“At the same time, we call it global warming, not America warming, so let’s not put a burden on us alone and have the rest of the world skate by without having to participate in this effort. It’s a global effort.”

Climate change finally provided the defining moment of a national debate and it is clear that some of the leading Republican candidates were eager to talk about this issue on the national stage.

Watch the video.

Rudy Giuliani spent fifteen minutes of a town hall meeting at UNH discussing energy issues.

In the first climate question Giuliani faced, the questioner reminded Giuliani that a cap and trade system uses the market to find the cheapest reductions through trading and pushes energy companies towards renewables.

Watch Rudy’s response.

Again, Giuliani stressed that he is not in favor of a cap and trade and explained that the clean technologies are not yet viable to meet the mandatory reductions.

Rudy then answered a question about the global economy and he spoke to the opportunity that the U.S. has to sell our energy sources to the developing world.

Watch Rudy’s response.

Finally, a UNH student asked a timely question about what position President Giuliani would take at the two week international climate change summit in Bali that began yesterday.

Watch Rudy’s response.

Giuliani believes that America’s domestic renewable energy technologies are developed enough to sell to the entire world and solve the international climate change crisis, but they are not yet ready to meet the emissions reductions required by a domestic cap and trade system.