President Obama is due in Copenhagen this week for the UN Climate Summit, where he’ll join over 100 other Heads of State to hopefully hammer out an effective, fair, and binding climate pact. But there is another delegation here from the US, and although they have no official capacity, they are leaving their mark. We could call them the "Flat-Earthers," but they are really a collection of Congressional Republicans bent on preventing the US from committing to a global treaty and from having the US change its energy infrastructure from one that’s fueled by dirty fuels to one powered by clean and green technologies.
About a half-dozen climate deniers are here in Denmark, according to Politico "to oppose plans for cap-and-trade legislation, express their discontent with the scientific community that researches climate change and call for the United Nations to halt any negotiations until the academic scandal known as "Climate-gate" is resolved."
They’re lead by House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana who said:
In the worst recession in 26 years, in the midst of an academic scandal and questionable science revealed in ‘Climategate’ and in the absence of a national consensus about policies that would bear upon the category known as climate change, we gather here to say, Mr. President, don’t make promises in Copenhagen that we cant keep.
Rep. Pence would do well to read the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), which finds that a pathway to a low carbon economy can lead to big economic benefits.
According to the report:
There is no inevitable trade-off between climate change mitigation and development. On the contrary, climate change mitigation is a process of global structural change which offers huge economic opportunities for developing countries.
Pence and his allies could also listen to their party’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, who, when she was governor of Alaska, wrote her to constituents:
Alaska’s climate is warming. While there have been warming and cooling trends before, climatologists tell us that the current rate of warming is unprecedented within the time of human civilization. Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other areas, and the warming will continue for decades.
The stakes here are too high for deniers to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they can’t see what’s really happening to our planet. By committing to strong emissions reduction targets and by creating the cleaner technologies to power our world, the US can again lead the world. The US, traditionally the world leader in innovation because of our unmatched university and research institutions, is poised to show the way, but without Congressional leadership progress will be almost impossible. There’s still time for the Flat-Earthers to listen to reason. Congress will again take up climate in 2010, and Pence and his allies can get on the right side of history.
