Presidential Candidate Profiles On Climate Change: A Hillary Clinton Update
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 11. 7.07
Grist has published a thoughtful analysis of US Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton's updated climate policies platform. The major political point by Grist's David Roberts in this analysis:
With the release of Clinton's plan, all three Democratic front runners for the presidency now have visionary, far-reaching energy plans that would fundamentally reorient the country away from carbon-intensive energy and toward energy efficiency and renewables. It is difficult to think of a another policy issue on which the ground has shifted so far, so fast, and difficult to think of another policy issue on which the gulf between the two political parties is so vast and striking.
Why is this important? We think the winning candidate from either party should link their proposals on jobs, health, peace, and climate. Each time a presidential candidate raises the bar on climate policy further, leveraging the jobs, health, peace platform ideas along with that climate platform, he or she ups the pressure for other candidates of both parties to do the same.
Let's turn this on end to clarify. If climate policies put forward by individual Candidates are proposed as stand-alone, command and control programs, based primarily on the media-based 1980's model of US environmental management (air, water, & land), they'll drag their respective campaigns down. Conversely, if Candidate climate proposals are designed specifically to mesh with job, health, and peace proposals, it's an integrated strategy for victory, transcending the single issue politics that were typical of the last two election cycles.
Important aside: Adapting to climate change impacts seems not yet to have emerged as the debate topic that it deserves to be. Drought, preparation for and response to it, and water resources management, in general, are near term issues of growing significance that cry out for attention.
Candidate Bill Richardson gets TreeHugger kudos for bravely suggesting the need for grappling with water issues at a national scale, in spite of his foot in mouth statement about Wisconsin water. See our post about that debacle here.
Drought is not an Army Corps of Engineers project. It's a not just a Homeland Security/FEMA emergency response issue. And, it's not something to dump on the hydrologists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Nor is water resources management only something to be handled by the States, as current events in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida amply demonstrate.
From the NGO side, the Red Cross is clearly not up to the task of large scale drought response, as this post demonstrates.
Which Federal agency is likely the best one to take the lead of drought and flood issues? USEPA gets our vote because of their long history of administering the Clean Water Act. But, lets see what the candidates say. Better late than China.
See also our recent John Edwards update here and the climate policy profiles of most candidates, posted here.
Via::Grist, "Clinton's climate and energy plan. Some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of Hillary's new proposal" Image credit::Honoring Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton
Where are the articles about smaller candidates like Kucinich and Gravel? And where are the articles about Republicans?
Come on, Treehugger, you can do better than play into the already mindbogglingly stupid election system.
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I will be delighted to produce posts on Kucinich and Gravel. Point me to a source of information on their climate policies and it'll happen even faster.
PS: Not wanting to turn TH into a politically focused site, I've been profiling candidates once a week or more often only as seminal references come to my attention.
Gravel is not a serious candidate. He's a joke.
Here's a good resource for treehuggers looking for candidates.
http://www.presidentialprofiles2008.org/
from
http://www.lcv.org/
John, come on, Treehugger is by default a political site. It aims to provide information about laws, programs and policies enacted by governments and their agencies in respect to the environment (EPA, OSHA, USDA, FDA etc.)
What it isn't is a partisan political site, although it would probably be fair to say the readership skews center-left.
That said, TH is also political because, largely, it concerns itself with a particular mode of organization of production, capitalism. The site occasionally pays lip service to alternative economic models that might serve the environment better (communitarian models, powerdown and return to agrarian economy, etc.) The default assumption of the site is that capitalism can fix the problems it has created. That, in and of itself is political, although it's so ingrained into our Western worldview that we don't even question it.
Inasmuch as this affects your series of articles --- dude, go for it. Frankly the lack of Treehugger US party-nomination coverage so far has been astounding. I think we get more coverage of Canada (yay for me), but it's in the public interest to do a rundown of all the candidates' green credentials and plans.
Kucinich has the sanest plan for energy -- he's the only one that mentions Peak Oil by name, and has a plan for a green Manhattan Project to get America onto a post-oil transition; he's against nuclear and opposes the privatization of water.
of course, he's the longshot candidate, but he does seem to be the moral conscience of the Democrats at the moment.
http://www.dennis4president.com/go/issues/a-sustainable-future/
Hillary is such an ambiguous president candidate. First she votes against ethanol then she changes her mind and decides to support it in her energy plan. In the last debate, she contradicted herself in different subjects, which is obvious in this video that compares her many contradictions at the same day: http://www.weshow.com/us/p/22225/the_politics_of_parsing_by_hillary_clinton
You guys that have watched the debate or this video that shows just some of her obvious contradictions should agree with me that we just can't vote for a so clearly pathetic candidate.
[conyers?]
united for truth elicit fear smear blacklist.
honesty compassion intelligence guts...