Barack Obama in new global warming fight

Stonewalling by opponents means key legislation is unlikely to be in place by Copenhagen summit
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
Barack Obama's efforts to forge a new American consensus around the need for action on climate change has run into a brick wall of Republican opposition, with senators threatening a boycott of a proposed law to cut carbon emissions.
The Senate opens a three-day blockbuster of hearings on Tuesday, calling 54 administration officials and environment experts to try to push ahead on a climate change law before a meeting in Copenhagen that is supposed to produce a global action plan on climate change.
With that deadline looming, Obama has made his most forceful appeal to date for Congress to act on climate change. The president said on Friday that Americans had now arrived at a point of convergence on the need to move towards cleaner energy. "I do believe that a consensus is growing," he said. Those still unpersuaded, he said in a speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were outside the mainstream.
"The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalised," Obama said. "The closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we'll hear from those whose interests or ideology run counter to the much-needed action that we're engaged in."
But a threat by a powerful Republican senator to stay away from bill-drafting sessions diminishes the already slim hopes that Congress will pass a law reducing US greenhouse gas emissions before international negotiations in Copenhagen in December.
James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who gained notoriety for calling global warming a hoax, told reporters late on Friday that he and fellow Republicans on the environment and public works committee might refuse to participate.
Inhofe said Republicans would stay away from bill-writing sessions unless they got enough time to review more than 800 pages of proposals in detail. That stay-away would deny the committee a quorum.
"We're not being unreasonable," Inhofe said. "The only leverage we have is the quorum leverage, and if we get stonewalled, we'll use it."
Republican opposition to climate change legislation is not rock solid. Last week, a leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, wrote a column in the New York Times in support of legislation.
"Global climate change is not a religion to me but I do believe carbon pollution is harmful to the environment and I want to find a way to fix that problem," Graham said on Friday.
However, he did not go so far as to support the proposals currently before the Senate. "It's got to be good business. None of the bills in the House or the Senate right now are good business," Graham said. A number of conservative Democrats are also opposed to the proposed legislation.
Such divisions – and the unrelenting timetable – have discouraged even the biggest supporters of the climate change legislation. Last week, John Kerry, who helped write the bill, admitted for the first time it was unlikely to pass before Copenhagen.
However, Obama appeared to be just getting into the fight, indirectly accusing the business lobby that has spearheaded the fight against climate change of cynicism.
"There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy – when it's the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs," Obama said.
The US Chamber of Commerce has spent nearly $35 million in the past three months lobbying against the Obama administration's energy, healthcare and financial reforms.
The media barrage against climate change has shaken public faith in Obama's green energy agenda, said James Hoggan, a PR executive and author of Climate Cover-Up, a book about anti-environmental spin. "When you have so many people convinced that the legislation is a tax grab, and that cap and trade will increase the cost of energy in the gas tank and at home, that is a problem," he said. "Reframing this as an opportunity for green jobs is really hard – even for someone as skilled as Obama is."
Obama's claims of an emerging national consensus were undermined by a poll last week showing a sharp decline in the number of Americans convinced that there was solid scientific evidence of global warming.
Only 57% of Americans believe that the Earth's atmosphere is warming – a sharp fall from the 77% in 2007, said the poll of 1,500 people by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press.