Business, environmental groups steal some Bush thunder

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Posted on January 22, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Today, a coalition of business and environmental groups will descend on Washington to promote their call for mandatory caps on carbon emissions, including a cap-and-trade program, as first steps to address our global warming/climate change crisis.

The US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) issued a press statement on Friday laying out their intentions.  You can read it here.  At the bottom of the statement is the list of groups that make up the coalition.

The environmental goal is to reduce global atmospheric GHG concentrations to a level that minimizes large-scale adverse impacts to humans and the natural environment. The group recommends Congress provide leadership and establish short- and mid-term emission reduction targets; a national program to accelerate technology research, development and deployment; and approaches to encourage action by other countries, including those in the developing world, as ultimately the solution must be global.

Oh, President Bush won’t like this at all, especially that last part about the necessity of international cooperation.

The Financial Times covered this story today, and you can read their article here.  Accompanying this article is one that focuses on a major power industry leader, Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, and his support for regulations to reduce carbon emissions, not overwhelmingly popular among his colleagues.

Finally, an Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post by Sebastian Mallaby points out that just as this global warming/climate change issue is beginning to get up a head of steam, our president is falling farther and farther behind — a “‘wallflower,” Mallaby calls him.

Kind of a bystander, I might add, as his approach to global warming is a lot like his approach to Iraq — can’t admit he was wrong about either one, can’t seem to actually learn something new, to grow, one might say.  This lack of leadership in both cases (as in so many other things) is leading, all right — leading us right into disaster compounded by more disaster.

However, as we have written before, the corporate world is figuring this out, and many corporate leaders are jumping on the global-warming bandwagon, aware of what climate change will mean for their bottom line — that, along with looming oil and gas shortages in the next couple of decades.  They want help, and they want clear rules to know how to proceed.  There’s nothing like uncertainty when business looks at the future — the market doesn’t like it.

From the perspective of this blog and project, these efforts will still fall very, very short, and global warming is only one part of our ecological crisis (for example, some of these guys want to be able to do more drilling here in the US in the name of energy independence, or to have more government support for corn ethanol — ecologically dubious, to say the least).  However, they are important steps forward and offer us new opportunities to open more political spaces for the larger conversation that we must have, and soon — how we are going to live through a period when human beings will quickly discover that we are living beyond the means of the planet to support life, including our own.

I hope it is true, as Mallaby writes, that we have entered the ‘post-Bush era’ on climate change.  I hope that this new political climate means that we can also start moving to address the real defining reality of our times — overshoot.  Read more about it here.

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