http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/12/AR2010021203910.html Did D.C.'s blizzard bury climate change legislation?
Sunday, February 14, 2010The Post asked political and environmental experts whether the record snowstorms buried climate change legislation this year. Below, responses from Christine Todd Whitman, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward, David G. Hawkins, Douglas E. Schoen, Emily Figdor and Ed Rogers.
...CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN
It shouldn't, but it will. Among the reasons winter storms will make this issue more politically challenging are overreach and simplification -- on both sides of the debate. "An Inconvenient Truth" brought the issue of climate change to the fore, but many of the charts implying that the world's end is near were overly dramatic.
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KENNETH P. GREEN AND STEVEN F. HAYWARD
The corpus of climate legislation was already cooling before Snowmageddon. The cold wind that buried its chances this year didn't come off the snow burying Washington: It came off horrific unemployment reports, lackluster economic growth, massive Tea Party rallies and vicious town hall meetings. After the breakdown in Copenhagen, the explosion of "Climategate" and the election of Scott Brown, the Democrats' rapid pivot to focus on jobs was inevitable.
...DAVID G. HAWKINS
Just as a group of cancer-free, cigarette-smoking 75-year-olds does not disprove that smoking causes cancer, a handful of snowstorms does not counter the massive evidence that we are changing the Earth's climate. What is that evidence? We know the gases produced when we burn fossil fuels trap heat in the atmosphere; emissions of those gases have grown enormously in the past 100 years; the concentrations of those gases in the atmosphere have grown in lock step; global average temperatures have increased over the same period, and natural influences on temperature can explain only a small fraction of that increase. We also know that the resulting changes in climate have already had detectible impacts on ecosystems, droughts, precipitation patterns and other features important to human well-being. People who hype the snowstorms to oppose action on climate are charlatans.
...DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
The recent bout of wintry weather and the overall political climate have almost certainly killed climate-change legislation this year.
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