We're fighting the "carbon lobby" when we should be fighting global warming
By Josh Zaharoff
Posted on Mon Jun 11, 2007 at 06:55:48 PM EST
I believe we need to fight global warming. You, if you're like 75% or more of the American population, believe we need to fight global warming. We recognize that this problem transcends political parties and class and race because it threatens to throw all of us into an environment of severe and unpredictable weather, economic trauma, and ecological catastrophe.
Except we're not fighting global warming. We're fighting the carbon lobby.
Even the relatively new issue of global warming has been batted around since 1988, when Al Gore began talking about its potentially dire effects. Now, despite a foot-high stack of proposed legislation on the subject, virtually nothing has been done.
Mr. Gore said it was extremely difficult to move the political system when it is paralyzed by partisan passion and beset by well-financed and well-organized interests. He refers to the combination of the oil, coal and automobile industries as the "carbon lobby," which he said is very difficult to defeat.
We shouldn't still be fighting with a small band of holdouts who insist on belching greenhouse gases into the air and blocking all efforts to make cars more fuel efficient.
But we have to fight them, instead of the real enemy--global warming--because they have the money and the political clout to block even the most common sense reforms.
Perhaps the real enemy here isn't human-driven warming of the planet, it's the lobbyists that prevent us from waging the real fight, putting their own companies' profit margins above the interest of the people, and it's the system that allows them to continue that.
The battleground, then, isn't the smokestacks and tailpipes alone, it's in Congress: whether we can undercut the influence of those well-heeled special interests by passing public financing of campaigns to free lawmakers from the money chase and allow them to vote based on what's best for all of their constituents.
What are we willing to do to win that battle?
Tags: global warming, money in politics, al gore, public financing, clean elections (all tags)
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