International responsibility also means preserving our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders. Americans and Europeans need to get serious about substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years or we will hand over a much-diminished world to our grandchildren. We need to reinvigorate the US-European partnership on climate change where we have so many common interests at stake. The US and Europe must lead together to encourage the participation of the rest of the world, including most importantly, the developing economic powerhouses of China and India.
I have introduced legislation that would require a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but that is just a start. We need a successor to Kyoto, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner. New technologies hold great promise. We need to unleash the power and innovation of the marketplace in order to meet our environmental challenges. Right now safe, climate-friendly nuclear energy is a critical way both to improve the quality of our air and to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.
So, to recap, US-European partnership on reducing emissions, a new international treaty, new technology, nuclear power, and cap and trade. I'm not a big fan of the nuclear part -- mostly because it's not really clean and it's stupid-expensive -- but the rest sounds good, right?
This plan to save the world was put forward by John McCain. But that was a long, long time ago -- going on 400 days ago now -- and McCain's saying different things about cap and trade now. Why? Because he's a Republican. Republicans now define what they stand for as "everything Democrats want is wrong." So McCain -- a good little mavericky GOP footsoldier -- jumped right on that bandwagon. He put cap and trade to the rigorous test of seeing if dems liked it and determined that it was just the worst thing ever. Where cap and trade was once a common sense solution to global warming that relied on markets to reduce emission, CaT is now a commie plot to ruin corporations and raise revenues for the federal government. Democrats are for it, President Obama's for it, so it must be bad. Good Republicans are guided by their jerking knees... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
