Score one for the environment

[babylonsister]

Score one for the environment

On Nov. 4, the tension was unbearable. Fortunately for our air, water and wildlife, Barack Obama triumphed.

By Katharine Mieszkowski



Dec. 31, 2008 | Before hailing the close of the Bush administration's eight-year attack on the environment and scientific integrity, and celebrating Barack Obama's takeover, let us pause to imagine an alternative future with John McCain and Sarah Palin in the White House.

Even a grizzly bear shudders to think of it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, McCain and Palin displayed a callous disregard for scientific research, while attempting to make light of wasteful government spending. On the stump, McCain ridiculed a major grizzly bear study, charging that the taxpayers had spent millions to study DNA of bears in Montana and joking, "I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue." Never mind that McCain himself voted to fund the totally legit study, which assessed the federally protected species' distribution in a 12,000-square-mile area in and around Glacier National Park.

In the Senate, McCain had shown leadership on climate change, attempting to pass legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions. So where was that McCain on the campaign trail? No doubt to please the Republican base, he abandoned his support for government regulation as a tool for fighting global warming. And while he paid lip service to clean energy, his voting record showed him to be one of the strongest opponents of renewable energy funding in the Senate.

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If McCain-Palin had won the election, we'd be looking forward to another four years of scientific research as a sorry punch line. But, yes Virginia, it was not to be.

With the election of Obama, Americans chose a president who not only respects science, but actually respects the views of the climatologists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who are urging the U.S. and the world to combat global warming. In December, Obama nominated Steven Chu, a Nobel-prizing winning physicist and champion of alternative energy, to run the department of energy. "His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science," Obama said, when he was announcing the nomination: "We will make decisions based on facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action."

Obama also appointed Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, to the new position of energy czar. Browner, who is an ally of Al Gore, will head up a White House council on energy and climate. Lisa Jackson, a commissioner in New Jersey's environmental department, who will take over the embattled Environmental Protection Agency, has been a vocal critic of the current agency. "When it comes to the auto industry," she has said, "the E.P.A. apparently is the Emissions Permissions Agency."

Those attitudes are a breath of fresh air after the Bush administration. For eight long years, it has dragged its feet on global warming, while China -- now the world's number one greenhouse gas emitter -- and India have used the U.S.'s inaction as an excuse to do nothing. In December at international climate talks in Poland, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore underscored the monumental problem of global warming, charging that current international goals to reduce emissions aren't ambitious enough to prevent catastrophe, echoing the concerns of NASA climate scientist James Hansen and writer Bill McKibben.

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http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/12/31/environment_2008/