The Bush legacy will be driven by global warming concludes Kurt Campbell chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. Climate Progress has made a similar point, and I have my own column on how history will view Bush here.

Campbell has written an article on “The Inheritance on Climate,” in the New York Times blog. Campbell served in the Pentagon in the Clinton administration, in charge of Asia/Pacific issues. He also has a chapter in the same Center for New American Security and CSIS book as Pete Ogden and John Podesta.

He concludes:

Yet to my mind, the inheritance that in retrospect will carry with it the greatest regret and misgivings will be the lack of leadership of the United States over the last seven years on the issue of climate change. President Bush recently convened a summit of sorts among some sympathetic leaders and titans of industry on the matter of climate change to make clear that he now accepts climate change as an “issue of concern.” This effort was in many ways an alternative forum designed to avoid the likely public dunning the United States president would have been subjected to by the global community if he had instead chosen to participate in the concurrent United Nations effort on the same subject.

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The former President will be streamed live from Chicago in a few minutes (I think around 10 am CST). You can watch him here.

We’ve seen in Part I that The Political Climate is Changing. How should Presidential candidates talk about climate in the 2008 campaign?

My advice to the candidates is to love the global warming Deniers and Delayers to death and to handle the economic issue head-on. Invite them into constructive discussion. Elevate the dialogue. Emphasize without stop or deviation that climate change is not a partisan issue and it should not be a political issue. Talk about the massive new global markets awaiting innovative American technologies, about climate change as the next great challenge for the nation’s genius, about how tackling climate change is our path to security and prosperity in the 21st Century. It happens to be the truth.

Follow Barrack Obama’s example of truth-telling. He had the guts earlier this year to tell the Detroit Economic Club that we need to raise CAF‰ standards. He won praise from TIME columnist Joe Klein this week for refusing to pander to voters.

Klein spent a day with Obama in Iowa and watched him handle a question about global warming. Obama talked about the need for a cap-and-trade regime to reduce carbon emissions, then said: “One of the themes of this campaign is to tell voters what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear…So I’ve got to tell you there will be a cost to this — and the utility companies will pass it along to consumers. You can expect a spike in electricity prices.” Then he added the critical message: New technologies will eventually bring prices back down.

Obama also could have said this:

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