My friend Tyler Hamilton, who covers energy and clean technology development for The Toronto Star is impressed with Democratic candidate Barack Obama when it comes to climate change. “Obama is saying the right things at a time when, more than anything, we need U.S. leadership on the climate-change file,” Hamilton writes at his blog.
But the climate change activists who publish the DeSmogBlog just named Obama their Smogmaker of the Year, saying he deserves it for sowing confusion and delay on climate change:
An outspoken supporter of the U.S. coal industry, Obama has presented himself as someone who can overcome the Bush legacy of inaction on climate change. But he is campaigning on a greenhouse gas reduction ‘target’ that the U.S. won’t have to meet for 42 years and he has continued to promote the current administration’s plan to circumvent the Kyoto Protocol, the only international climate agreement currently in place.
But another green activist says DeSmogBlog’s has it all wrong:
How can they make that claim? By misreading — or failing to read — Obama’s terrific climate plan. … his plan explicitly states:
Obama will start reducing emissions immediately in his administration by establishing strong annual reduction targets, and he’ll also implement a mandate of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
[DeSmogBlog] claim [Obama] is an unrepetent coal supporter… And yet in his climate plan he bluntly commits:
Obama will use whatever policy tools are necessary, including standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology. Obama’s stringent cap on carbon will also make it uneconomic to site traditional coal facilities and discourage the use of existing inefficient coal facilities.