Change Is In The Air

President-elect Barack Obama addressed a Los Angeles climate conference today and affirmed that his administration's commitment to action to stave off global warming has not been dampened by the economic downturn.

"Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," Obama says. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."

A new bipartisan coalition has coalesced to address climate change, building in statehouses across the country -- particularly in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West, and anchored in California (with kudos to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who finally extricated himself from Bushism and began to take after his action-hero characters) -- as an end-run around the White House.

Obama addresses that movement directly:

"When I am president, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America."

You may recall that Bush offered a "plan" in April -- to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. That, of course, was a cute way of saying we will continue to increase the megatons-volume of greenhouse gases the U.S. emits for another 17 years before we do anything at all.

Obama is committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050.

This is the first great sign that the days of sending guys who work for Exxon to international climate conferences as the U.S. representative, hellbent on torpedoing international agreement and scuttling action (remember when Exxon told EPA officials not to undermine Bush's legacy by regulating greenhouse gases?) is finally coming to a close.

Not yet, though. Globe Warmin' Bush is moving to "burrow" pro-industry, anti-environment political appointees into permanent Civil Service positions at the Interior Department -- where they're pushing to allow oil drilling virtually within our national parks, and Bush's EPA is moving swiftly to enact new regulations that will weaken the Clean Air Act to allow coal-burning power plants within sight of -- and upwind from -- national parks.

The good news is that, because of Bush's impervious fealty to Exxon's climate policy, support for action has built from the bottom up -- a solid foundation -- and will be ready to work with the new Administration to get the ball rolling on January 20 -- the day the nearly eight-year occupation of the White House by the energy industries ends.

Obama gets it. The way to rescue the economy is to make it America's business to rescue the planet.

(See also, Friedman, Thomas. Hot, Flat, and Crowded.)

Obama's pledge of $150 billion over ten years to invest in efficient technologies -- and kickstart new energy efficiency-based industries -- doesn't sound like much, since we're spending $200 billion each year in Iraq to maintain the petro-status-quo (imagine if we'd spent all that bread on alternative fuel technologies instead, to ensure we'd never have to fight a war for oil again). It may not be enough.

But it looks increasingly like the United States of America, city on the hill, beacon of hope, leader of the free world, is about to emerge from its forced early retirement.