Commentary

The fight against global warming is about creating new American industry and jobs, strengthening our national security by being more energy independent, and keeping our economy healthy by weaning it off of resources without a healthy long-term future.

Yet, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) calls global warming, "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and said that former Vice President Al Gore is "full of crap".

Senator Inhofe is a Republican conservative and is a senator from Oklahoma, one of America's biggest oil and coal producing states.  President Bush, the person most responsible for America's 2001-2006 "the issue needs further study" approach is a Republican conservative from another big oil producing state and former oilman.

Since Republicans, oil companies and coal companies have traditionally been against environmental regulation and constraints on drilling or consuming fossil fuels, it has been easy to say that the anti-global warming critics are just defending the economic hand that feeds them. 

Is that all there is to it?  I wonder whether part of the backlash produced is a reaction to the implication that environmentalists are saying their lifestyle is wrong and immoral. 

I recently advocated for a reduction in electricity use and the resulting reduction carbon dioxide emissions at an organization's main physical plant.  While the audience was generally sympathetic to the global warming issue, I managed to cause offense among those responsible for the physical plant.  The problem was that what they were hearing was "you are doing something bad".  People don't like that much.  I know I don't.

VP Al Gore goes to great lengths in An Inconvenient Truth to say that global warming is not a Democrat vs. Republican issue that divides us.  It is a moral issue that should unify us.  During the movie, I was nodding my head.  Yet we need to make sure that as advocates of change we are not telling people that they are immoral.  Americans love SUVs and fast cars.  They love well-lit buildings.  Are Americans immoral?  No and I'm sure VP Gore would agree. 

Moral issue or not, politics has much to say about where we go from here.  Who we elect to be the next President and what laws Congress passes are a critical factor in the American fight against global warming.  The politics say that there is not much future in a political movement that tells people that they are overweight in carbon dioxide terms and need to go without.

Governor Schwarzenegger (R-CA) points out that our climate change problem is not with SUVs but with SUV engines.  Let's update the engine technology so that people can continue to enjoy Hummers.  The environmental movement will not get anywhere by trying to take SUVs away from people, he points out.

That is what is exciting about the progress being made in the global warming debate these days.  Sure, there are the rabid deniers mercilessly pitching the "it's a hoax", "it's un-American to criticize dissent", "Environmentalists just want more power", "it's big government, big brother run amok", "the coastal intellectual elite is trying to tell mainstream Americans what to do", blah, blah, blah. 

Mostly, however, we've got American businesses beginning to engage and say, there is nothing about carbon reduction that means we can't continue to make money and support American jobs and Americans' standard of living.  What American businesses need is not the unrestricted ability to put carbon dioxide into the air; it needs to know the long-term regulatory framework it will be working under so that it can make the appropriate investments and strategy decisions.