That President Obama will travel, after all, to Copenhagen next month to take part in the United Nations climate change conference is huge news in my house - or at least, in my daughter's high school environmental activism club.
There are those who argue that the U.S., even with a Democratic President and Congress, is not ready to come in from the cold on climate change in a formal manner, that the Obama Administration has moved too slowly in joining international action. But the actions of the President speak loudly, particularly to young activists who very often drive this issue with more passion than their political professional elders.
So Obama's trip to Copenhagen, where he will speak at the beginning of the conference and then zip over to Oslo to collect his Nobel, is important to the environmental movement in the U.S. I know that I was hearing a bit of "why should we bother?" after a long day of telephone-banking to Congressional offices - but that was when the young activists believed the Administration would skip Copenhagen.
Welcome too is the small bit of policy the President will bring with him: "a tentative promise to reduce production of climate-altering gases," the first time the U.S. has ever entered in the arena of concrete emission numbers. According to John Broder in the Times, Obama "will tell the delegates to the climate conference that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said. No American administration has ever delivered even a tentative pledge on emissions reductions because Congress has never enacted climate legislation or approved an international global warming agreement with binding emissions targets."
But the White House is doing something else as well: firing up the portion of the activist base that spends long afternoons calling Congress about climate change.
from Amazon.
