NY Times Climate Change Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/opinion/22mon1.html?th&emc=th

Today's Times editorial on climate is powerful and direct. Anyone who reads it should respect it. Sincere people who resign from a position like Yvo de Boer's (chief steward of the United Nations' climate change negotiations) after 4 years of effort to try to get some progress on global warming mitigation, deserves attention and support. We would hypothesize here that the term "global warming" causes such negative reaction that, perhaps something else needs to be substituted (climate mitigation?).

Nobody wants pollution. For those of you who have discussed this issue with me, you know that nuclear power, wind power and other fresh alternatives are all sources of energy that we favor. Twenty years ago, we had a right to worry about nuclear - now we don't.

Mr. de Boer was frustrated by Copenhagen. The Senate is stalemated over a climate change bill. There will evidently be further talks on climate in December in Cancun. But, to what end?

The United Nations process on climate is cumbersome and slow but we feel that is a function of the sheer size of the process - as we have said in the past, you're not going to get 193 nations to agree on what time it is. As we predicted, Copenhagen would accomplish nothing (90 countries representing 83% of the world's greenhouse gases).

However; the approach mentioned by the Times that involves the "Major Economies Forum..." or the Group of 20 has a chance because there are "reasonable numbers" of countries/opinions on what to do.

The Times is right: the ultimate goal is a safe planet. That goal can be best achieved by aggressive national strategies to reduce emissions (this, of course, does not mean that we agree with our own EPA and their quest to get the carbon - we put "jobs" ahead of carbon).

As the Times points out, the United States has no national strategy. We could use one!