Not the best state for the climate/fuel economy message, obviously. Still, a bad sign for those who want this issue discussed intelligently in the campaign.

I was watching Fox news coverage of the GOP primary — why not? — and I think it was Bill Kristol who Fred Barnes said, “John McCain is going to have to stop antagonizing conservatives” if he wants to win, since the GOP is a conservative party.

And what precisely was McCain doing to antagonize conservatives? He was “talking about climate change” and pushing the idea of “promoting green technology in Michigan.”

We have a long, long way to go, I’m afraid, before this country can take united action to save the livability of the planet for future generations.

Kansas is no stranger to controversy, to being pulled in opposing directions. During the Civil War, Bleeding Kansas, as the state was called, was trapped in the middle of the country – at the tender border between the Confederacy and the Union – and regularly a witness to bloody raids and battles over slaves.

Today, the state finds itself caught at the intersection of an aging, dirty energy habit and a clean, prosperous energy future. In that sense, the differing visions of the state’s legislature and the Governor are a microcosm of the national (and global) debate on climate and energy.

In an op-ed today, written on behalf of the editorial board of The Wichita Eagle, the local paper (in a city that typically keeps the pulse of the heart of truly red conservativism) essentially declared its support for the bold energy vision of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, articulated clearly in her State of the State address earlier this week.

Gov. Sebelius has devoted her most recent political endeavors to moving Kansas to the forefront of energy pioneers, despite the kicking and wrestling of some internal forces stuck clinging to the past. But if the legislators really know what’s best for the state, they will work with Sebelius to realize her vision, stated the paper’s editorial board.

What is her vision?

[To] again lead an American transformation — lead America to energy security by tapping our fertile resources, our workers, and the ingenuity of Kansas entrepreneurs. We can — and we must — reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and increase our economic competitiveness by using our natural resources.

Overall, I got a better feel for Sebelius’ earlier policies on education than her idea of Kansas’ energy future from the op-ed. But what I also took away from the piece is that Sebelius is a courageous and trustworthy leader for the cause. And some of our strongest leaders emerge when conflict keeps them on their heels, but they perservere.

Hats off to The Wichita Eagle editorial board for recognizing Sebelius’ (and Kansas’) potential and for coming out in support of a leader willing to take worthwhile political risks.

Think Progress has the whole story, but I’ll repeat it here, since, tragically, it may represent the shape of things to come in climate politics for many years, making it hard for Republicans to do the moral thing on climate:

Last weekend, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) slammed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for supporting “radical climate change legislation,” and “pushing for a massive new energy tax.” Romney is using an anti-environment front group, the American Environmental Coalition (AEC) to attack McCain. Last week, AEC co-chair George Landrith, said

When it comes to climate change, John McCain and Al Gore are far too much alike for my comfort. John McCain has been sponsoring legislation for the past several years that would give Al Gore much of the regulatory control and power he sought when he and Bill Clinton tried to get America to sign on to the UN’s Kyoto global warming treaty….

When listening to John McCain, it would seem that evangelicals should remember the biblical warning found in St. Matthew 7:15 to “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

Sad. And quoting the Bible, too! [Note to Romney/AEC -- You need a more plausible metaphor: McCain may be many things, but he's no sheep.]

And as Think Progress progress explains, “AEC is closely tied to the Romney campaign — something Landrith apparently didn’t think to disclose.” AEC’s member rolls reveals the multiple links to the Romney campaign:

Read more

If you are one of those people who loves the quiet communion of hiking in the high-country forests of Colorado, you’d better get there fast. In three years, those forests may be gone.

The Rocky Mountain News reported this week that every large, mature forest of lodgepole pines in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead in 3-5 years. Some 1.5 million acres of pine forest already have been destroyed since 1996. State and federal foresters call the loss “catastrophic”.

What’s causing the massive die-off? The root cause appears to be global climate change. Winters are warmer. That allows pine bark beetles to survive. The lodgepoles are less able to defend themselves because they have been stressed by years of drought. As a result, a rice-sized bug is felling vast expanses of forests in Colorado. Similar die-offs are underway elsewhere in the western United States and in Canada.

(Forest management practices — mainly fire suppression in past years — also are to blame. Dense vegetation allows the beetles to spread more quickly and older trees are more susceptible to the bug.)

Lodgepoles as old as 300 years have been found in Colorado’s high country, where the slender trees, as tall as 80 feet, used to thrive. Today, visitors to parts of the Rocky Mountains see vast expanses of dead brown poles. Soon, they’ll see just the mountainsides. The trees will be gone.

The lodgepoles are a visual example of losses often not counted when we tally the costs of fossil fuels and global warming. Like other parts of our ecosystems, lodgepole pines perform a wide variety of “ecosystem services”, many of which have economic value. Among those services are wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, tourism, flood and erosion control, water filtration and carbon sequestration.

One of the impacts in Colorado, forestry experts told the Rocky Mountain News, will be the state’s water supplies — a valuable asset everywhere, but especially in the West. As the trees disappear, erosion will increase, choking rivers and reservoirs with sediment.

And as trees die or are burned, they release the carbon they stored when alive. Forest fires already release nearly 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year in the United States. One bad fire season can release as much CO2 as the energy sector in a given state, researchers have found.

Robert Costanza, founder of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, has estimated the value of ecosystem services at $33 trillion worldwide — more than the combined yearly GNPs of all the world’s economies.

Those services must be part of our analysis when we count the value of climate action — and the high costs of inaction. We tend to take our ecosystems for granted, as though they’ve always been here and always will. As will be the case with the dying high-country forests in Colorado, we don’t fully appreciate them until they’re gone.

– Bill. B.

• The High Costs of Doing Nothing, Part I
• The High Costs of Doing Nothing, Part II
• Climate-Driven Pest Devours N. American Forests

Perhaps the most politically relevant excerpt from Hell and High Water (paperback now at Amazon):

There is no doubt that the time to act is now. It is now that timely action can avert disaster. It is now that with foresight and will such action can be taken without disturbing the essence of our way of life, by adjusting behaviour, but not altering it entirely.
–Tony Blair, 2005

It’s important not to get distracted by chasing short-term reductions in greenhouse emissions. The real payoff is in long- term technological breakthroughs.
– John H. Marburger III, president’s science adviser, 2006

The mantra of the Delayers is “technology” and “technology breakthroughs.” Their technological fix to the greenhouse gas problem is, unsurprisingly, not imminent. It is “long-term.” But as we have seen earlier, failing to act in the near term–now–will bring about such drastic conditions that soon our only choice will be to react with extremely onerous government policies.

In 2005, British prime minister Tony Blair described the crucial two- prong strategy we must adopt: “We need to invest on a large scale in existing technologies and to stimulate innovation into new low- carbon technologies for deployment in the longer term.” Future technology will be able to help preserve our way of life in the long term if and only if we have already moved “on a large scale” to technologies that already exist. Over the next few decades, we must rapidly deploy available technologies that stop global carbon dioxide emissions from rising. Then, in the second half of this century, we must sharply reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by deploying all the new technologies we have developed.

The time to act is now…..

Conservative message makers, like Frank Luntz, realized that it could be politically dangerous to oppose any action on global warming, even if their efforts to obfuscate the climate science were successful. Luntz lays out a clever solution to this conundrum in his 2002 “Straight Talk” memo on climate change messaging [a must-read for all progressives]:

Technology and innovation are the key in arguments on both sides. Global warming alarmists use American superiority in technology and innovation quite effectively in responding to accusations that international agreements such as the Kyoto accord could cost the United States billions. Rather than condemning corporate America the way most environmentalists have done in the past, they attack us for lacking faith in our collective ability to meet any economic challenges presented by environmental changes we make. This should be our argument. We need to emphasize how voluntary innovation and experimentation are preferable to bureaucratic or international intervention and regulation.

This is the technology trap, where clean energy technology is used to delay action, rather than to foster action, on climate change….

Related Posts:

• Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.”
• Anti-environment, anti-technology Gingrich tries to rewrite history. Don’t buy it or his new book.
• What exactly is the difference between Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus?