The presidential candidates have vowed to take strong action on the twin, linked threats of climate change and energy insecurity. Remarkably, this means our next president — Republican or Democrat — will almost certainly be a declared environmentalist, committed to new policies on global warming.
John McCain celebrated his Super Tuesday win with the coveted endorsement from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at, of all places, a solar manufacturer. Imagine that – the presumptive Republican nominee and the Republican governor of the nation’s largest state in a grip-and-grin photo-op at a green company.
But beyond the green optics, the 44th president will inherit the Mother of All Environmental Issues, a global crisis that world leaders have called “our defining moment” and the science community says we must address now.
Meantime, while the atmosphere is accumulating carbon, the world is running low on oil. Within seven years, the head of Shell Oil predicts, global demand for oil will surpass production.
The good news? Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have substantive climate change platforms. However, McCain’s cap-and-trade policy isn’t as strong as Clinton’s or Obama’s.
The bad news? No candidate has yet committed to any timetable for action. There is hope, though. Even without Congressional legislation, the next president will have plenty of executive authority to mandate rapid change. For example:
Climate protection and energy security are legacy issues writ large. Neither will wait for the next president’s waning days in office, but must be boldly addressed immediately after Inauguration Day. Why? Because carbon concentrations in our atmosphere are building at unprecedented rates. The longer we wait, the harder our task becomes.
When the last four candidates, wearing various shades of green, all pose for their photo ops alongside wind turbines and solar panels, we should ask them not only what their climate and energy policies will be — but how rapidly they will promise to get them done.
Bill Becker is the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project at the University of Colorado Denver, a non-partisan team guided by a committee of climate science, security and policy experts that has produced a detailed climate change action plan for the first 100 days of the next Administration.
