It’s been clear for a while that Utah Governor Jon Huntsman bears watching. You’re bound to sit up and take notice when a Republican governor of a coal-dependent state decides to sign up for a regional agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The shrieks of climate denialists notwithstanding, Utahns apparently had little problem with Huntsman’s putting Utah into the Western Climate Initiative. He was re-elected governor November 4 with a handsome 78 percent share of the vote that his fellow Republican candidates could only dream about.
Huntsman’s resume has some sparkle to it. Like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, he has diplomatic experience. Like Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, he speaks fluent Mandarin.
We are also told that he rocks out to ...
At the rate that the stock market has declined over the past week or so, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will fall to zero by Thanksgiving, by which time America’s system of industrial capitalism will have collapsed and we’ll all be herding goats for a living.
Then, we can stop worrying about climate change.
OK, I’m kidding — I hope. A little dark humor never hurts in times of trouble and uncertainty.
But seriously ...
These are the days that we should be grateful that the Founding Fathers built federalism into the Constitution and retained a strong governance role for the states.
Last Thursday, when the Capitol descended into conniption fits over high finance, was one of those days. Oh, and the renewable energy and energy efficiency tax incentives that expire December 31 have been caught in the maw of partisan tantrums also. Huge investments in wind and solar energy on tap for 2009 are circling the drain.
To paraphrase the late, great Barry Goldwater, we might be well served to saw off Washington, DC, from the rest of the country and let it float out to sea.
While the pols in DC were looking out for number one, states from one end of the country to the other were getting some useful work done for their citizens.
Start with the Northeast. ...
Banking panics are supposed to be a forgotten relic of the 19th century, when laissez-faire reigned supreme and the federal government was composed mainly of clerks toiling away in a quiet Southern town by the Potomac River.
But there’s no getting away from human fears, which set off the old-fashioned banking panic that swept through the financial sector last week.
When the economy is fishtailing and the mentality is to circle the wagons, fear is taking hold. Which is not a sound environment for making decisions that have long-term environmental benefits.
The tendency is to deal with the short-term crisis and forget about long-term consequences. Understandable, but not always smart.
Here’s a sign of the times: A survey of chief marketing officers released this month by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows that cause-related marketing has plunged to the bottom of the priority list for marketing messages.
Marketing officers increasingly believe that financially-stressed customers are more interested in getting a good deal on products than in hearing that products are nice to polar bears. ...
This most unusual of presidential elections has become an all-consuming drama. The projection of 300 million sets of hopes and fears onto John McCain, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin is getting a wee bit close to the neurotic.
Whoops, sorry, Joe Biden, didn’t mean to leave you out, but your public profile seems to have gone out with the tide during the last two weeks.
Anyway, sometimes it helps to calm down, take a step back, and find out what we can learn from others about elections, policy debates, and leadership.
Take Canada, a great country, our biggest trading partner, and longtime friend that doesn't get enough attention from its giant, self-absorbed neighbor. It ought to be a tradition that a new U.S. president always goes to Canada for his or her first foreign trip.
Canada is holding a national election, which is getting scant notice south of the border. Parliament was dissolved last week and Canadians will go to the polls October 14. That’s the first thing that we can learn from our neighbors. What is taking us two years, Canada will accomplish in five weeks. ...
Politics had something to do with the draft Republican platform
including an acknowledgment that human activities play a role in
global climate change and not including a call for oil drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The politicos decided it wouldn’t be politic to adopt a platform that
contradicts their presidential candidate’s views favoring climate
legislation and opposing Arctic drilling.
The muttering was palpable. One of the platform committee members, Jeff
Grossman of Oregon, said that John McCain has some catching up to do
with the rest of the party on drilling the refuge.
In John McCain’s Navy, that’s known as insubordination. An ensign who
tells the admiral to get with the program will swiftly find himself
reassigned to new quarters in the brig. Grossman, it’s you who needs to
get with McCain’s program, not the other way around.
Papa-hanau-moku-akea. Once you break the word down into syllables, you can get the hang of pronouncing it.
The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument covers nearly 90 million
acres in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. As one of the largest
marine reserves in the world, the monument is a stunning seascape
featuring coral reefs, numerous tropical species, including sea
turtles, and rich archaeological sites.
The 2006 proclamation establishing the monument is a shiny jewel in the Bush administration’s otherwise checkered environmental record.
More such oceanic monuments may be established before President Bush
heads back to Crawford in six months. The word around DC is that Bush
is considering use of the Antiquities Act to establish a few more
really big monuments in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. Ocean advocates
are whispering tempting legacy thoughts into Bush’s ear about being the
“Teddy Roosevelt of the seas.”
If he follows through with the proposed monuments, he would deserve the flattering moniker.
Unfortunately, Bush’s marine conservation achievements are likely to be
overshadowed by the administration’s flaky record on global warming,
which was capped by Dick Cheney’s cack-handed squashing of the
administration’s last chance to do something positive about the problem.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. A twist on that aphorism might be that a conservative is a liberal who paid $80 to fill up the Volvo.
Polls show that more Americans, even liberal Democrats, support expanded domestic oil production. What if the poll respondents learned that a vast pool of oil sits untapped? It’s three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves and is emphatically within U.S. borders.
What are we waiting for? the poll respondents might exclaim.
Except that there’s a catch. Before the oil can be used, we have to wait 100 million years.
In an age when immediate gratification is considered a virtue, that simply won’t do. Shell is bringing technology to the rescue, to speed things up and tap the estimated 800 billion barrels of shale oil lying beneath the scrubby uplands of the central Rockies.
Shale oil is preemie oil. Strictly speaking, it’s a calcium carbonate rock containing a goopy hydrocarbon called kerogen. If we wait 100 million years, natural subterranean heat may turn the kerogen into crude oil. Since we can’t wait that long, Shell is experimenting with an audacious technology to heat the stuff artificially, and then bring it to the surface to quench our unquenchable oil thirst. More on Shell’s idea in a moment.
Instead of carrying begging bowls to Riyadh, why haven’t we tapped shale before? To answer that question, it’s important to know why crude oil is so valuable. ...
John McCain visited a wind technology plant in Portland Monday to tell the world that America wouldn’t fritter away another eight years before confronting global climate change.
It’s a message that the world needs to hear, from the halls of Congress in Washington to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. At Republicans for Environmental Protection, we thought it was a good speech, so we sent out a press release calling attention to it.
That’s when the creatures from the Internet black lagoon emerged, dripping with scorn about “tree-hugging morons” and filling up our president’s in-box with scientifically illiterate swamp gas about the global warming “hoax.”
The following day, a Tuesday, I attended a forum about environmental issues that McCain held near Seattle with a panel of Washington State business leaders, political dignitaries, and an Eagle Scout. He talked about seeing firsthand the impacts of climate change in the polar regions, developing energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and his confidence that America has the smarts to solve the problem, no matter what the doom-and-gloom, it-can't-be-done hand-wringers on the political right say. ...
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