The event Democrats tout as “the greenest convention ever” may be fading into brown.
Last week’s decision to move Barack Obama’s acceptance speech from Denver’s Pepsi Center to Invesco Field is expected to magnify the modest carbon footprint the party has boasted about for months.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for including up to 56,000 more people in Obama’s Aug. 28 audience, especially if most of them are Coloradans. After all, some things, such as political participation, are more important than greenhouse emissions from one event on one evening in Denver.
But it should be noted that the switch calls into question the Chinese water torture of self-righteous pronouncements that Dems have made for months about their greening efforts.
And — go figure — normally chatty planners suddenly are tight-lipped on the issue.
“It’s premature, considering we just announced the venue change, to calculate what the footprint might be,” said Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Convention Committee.
The DNCC has spent months developing a carbon-footprint “calculator” measuring the environmental impact of each event and suggesting that delegates pay a fee, or offset, to fund renewable projects.
News release after news release has gassed on about everything from the convention’s official carbon advisers to the high-efficiency lighting, biodiesel-fueled generators and solar arrays they’ve installed at the Pepsi Center.
Yet now, in one of their weaker attempts at spin, planners refuse to acknowledge that including “tens of thousands” more people in Obama’s audience might spew the tiniest bit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“I can’t speculate on that. . . . Those are details we’ve got people who are starting to delve into,” Wyeth said, leaving some to wonder how many Democrats it takes to screw in a lightbulb.
But I digress.
One Republican blogger was more than happy to speculate in a posting titled “Obama’s Big Speech is Environmental Disaster.” RiNOsaurusRex estimates the Invesco move could produce “at least four times more carbon dioxide pollutants” than if Obama spoke at the Pepsi Center.
RiNOsaurusRex goes on about the number of parking spots and kilowatt hours that he factored into a methodology that — big shock — the DNCC’s Wyeth debunks. She has noted, fairly, that GOP efforts to green their upcoming convention in St. Paul, Minn., pale compared with the Democrats’.
Which brings me to my point.
As absurd as it is for Republicans to use Obama’s Invesco move to try to seem greener than Democrats, it is far more irksome that Dems have turned their four- day powwow into their loudest statement yet on global warming.
Before they go so far with Invesco offsets that they start calling to cancel Broncos home games this season, let us remind Democrats that they hold the power to offset energy outputs far broader than at one political convention. They are, after all, the party controlling Congress — the very folks responsible for energy policies in our country.
If Democrats have a dirty little secret when it comes to energy, it has nothing to do with Obama’s speech one evening in a Denver football stadium and everything to do with their failure to persuade even their own members to pass federal renewable-energy standards — a long-term solution that Americans strongly want.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@ .
