Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
U.S. hunters, anglers weigh in on climate change
When people think of hunting and fishing politicians in America — at least prominent ones – two things spring to mind: 1. Republican and 2. Climate change skeptic. Former President George W. Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin all fall into both categories.
But the hunting and fishing crowd — widely seen as reliably Republican because of that’s party’s successful portrayal of itself as the defender of God and guns — has also started to take note of climate change. After all, hunters and anglers are in the outdoors in pursuit of wildlife season after season, year after year.
But what may concern some Republican strategists is that many of them also accept the science of climate change, which overwhelmingly points to fossil fuel emissions as the main cause driving global warming.
This may help explain why Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina broke ranks with his party to outline a compromise to limit carbon emissions in a Sunday New York Times opinion piece he co-wrote with Democratic Senator John Kerry. Hunters and anglers in the U.S. South are widely seen as part of the Republican base and his call for action was saluted on Wednesday during a teleconference call hosted by the South Carolina Wildlife Federation (SCWF) and involved other outdoor groups.
“I have observed things in my life time that suggest that significant impacts have already been felt here in our state,” said Clinch Heyward, the 60-year-old chairman of the SCWF.
He noted that in a life time of duck hunting he had noticed a decline in the state’s duck population while Virginia, where one of his sons now lives, had more and more ducks.
Ex-GOP diplomacy machine talking green
Unfairly or not, any discussion of the Republican party’s environmental record by clean energy advocates often includes a mention of the White House solar panels ditched under Ronald Reagan. Green-minded members of the Grand Old Party, on the other hand, would rather point to the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon. Either way, in what’s clearly a sign of the times, renewables featured high on the minds of three former GOP secretaries of state who popped up at various energy conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area this past week (One can only assume the timing was a coincidence).
George Schultz, who served under Reagan, probably surprised at least a few people when he counted himself as among those EV1 owners still regretting GM’s controversial scrapping of the electric car earlier this decade. A Stanford professor and Hoover Institution fellow for the past two decades, Schultz had enjoyed driving it around campus. “I could even drive it up to San Francisco. I couldn’t go too many other places, but it’s a very useful car,” he said. “I was sorry to see that car taken off the market, it worked just fine.” Speaking at a meeting of energy economists last week alongside Chevron’s David O’Reilly, Schultz went on to join the oil company CEO in endorsing a carbon tax as more efficient than the cap-and-trade system favored by Congress.
On Monday, Condoleezza Rice also favored a carbon tax when she addressed the Silicon Valley Energy Summit at Stanford, where she too is a professor and Hoover fellow, while stressing the importance of not picking winners in the push for greener energy. “At this stage, we need to have an open field for all renewable alternatives to change the energy mix,” she said.
Just down the road in Palo Alto the next day, the secretary of state under George Bush Sr., James Baker, ranked climate change alongside nuclear proliferation, the economy and wars as a leading global threat. “I’m not going to talk about the science of it, ’cause I don’t understand it,” he told a meeting on clean energy arranged by law firm Baker Botts. Yet he felt, as an outdoorsman, that good stewardship of the planet was vital, even if he saw the current climate change bill in Congress as flawed. He suggested it should be passed, but left unsigned by the president until big developing countries like China and India made similar moves against carbon, holding the bill back as a bargaining chip. “That’s Negotiation 101,” he later told Reuters.
Photo credits: Above: General Motors publicity photo of the EV1 passenger car. Below: REUTERS/Ron Sachs/Handout (Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks to supporters of the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital in Washington, in this handout image from May 3, 2009)
This may sound a bit odd but I actually love the smell of petrol and the sound of a roaring engine is like music to my ears. I’m sure there are many more petrol heads like me and convincing them to kick the habit will be a hard task.
from FaithWorld:
U.S. conservative Christians sound “cap and trade” alarms
America's social and religious conservatives are turning up the heat as they galvanize heartland opposition against the latest example of President Barack Obama-inspired "socialism" -- a climate change bill that aims to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which most scientists have linked to climate change.
The Democratic Party-led House of Representatives passed the bill on Friday. It would require large companies, including utilities and manufacturers, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. It must still go through the U.S. Senate, where its ultimate fate remains uncertain despite the Democratic majority there.
Conservative Christians, a key base -- if not THE base -- for the out-of-power Republican Party, are among the biggest skeptics of human-induced global warming. In the eyes of many environmentalists, they were part of an "unholy alliance" with the energy industry that enjoyed its zenith under former president George W. Bush, who pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting emissions in the developed world. The Bush administration was widely seen as hostile to any attempt to cap emissions as well as the science behind it.
Conservative Christians are sounding the alarm bells about the climate bill, which represents Obama's first major legislative victory and which Republicans see as a major opportunity to gain political ground ahead of the 2010 congressional elections. You can see our coverage of this issue here.
Republicans are calling it a "job killer" while the Cornwall Alliance -- a conservative Christian coalition -- has described its cap and trade provisions, which allow companies that pollute less than their limit to sell some of their permits to others struggling to meet such green requirements, "as the largest tax hike in history." Analysts have said such arguments may appeal to voters especially against the backdrop of the current recession.
I do not think we have even begun to address the change that the population has effected on the earth. We see only our country, but other countries have a large increase in population and the forest is still being cut in many countries. I predict that we will see less people on the earth due to sickness and food shortages. I also believe that we can run our cars without gasoline or diesel and we can also run our power plants without coal or natural gas.