Clinton Names Special Envoy for Climate Change

clipped from www.google.com In a sharp break from former president George W. Bush's approach to global warming, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has picked a special envoy for climate change, the State Department said Monday. Coming less than a week after Clinton assumed her job, the position signalled to US allies how urgently President Barack Obama's administration takes the threat posed by climate change after Bush played it down. A State Department official who asked not to be named identified the official as Todd Stern, a "former Clinton White House official with experience at Kyoto and Buenos Aries climate Change negotiations." "He has been active on the environmental front for some time," the official told AFP. Stern, a lawyer and environmental expert at the Washington think tank Center for American Progress, served as an advisor for Clinton from 1993 to 1998.

Although finally acknowledging that global warming was real and human-caused, the Bush administration's strategy on dealing with it was always "ignore it and it might go away."

By creating a special envoy from the State Department, we signal that not only do we take it seriously, but we plan to take leadership on the issue.

Good for us.