I believe Barack Obama is the candidate most likely to get the job done.  His campaign is based upon the proposition that effecting difficult political change in this country comes from the people who demand it, not from DC elites who devise and "implement" it.   More than any other candidate in the field, he highlights climate change as one of the urgent challenges facing the country, and I believe he can do what a President will have to do to get the job done:  Mobilize the public to demand action, and then work with Congress to enact the legislation.  More than any other candidate, he is likely to enlist the public in rising to the challenges that climate change creates for all of us, not just automakers and electric utilities.  His focus on youth, and the future, is well fitted to address an environmental problem whose severest risks and costs will fall far more heavily on the young than on we not-so-young citizens.

The broad reformist wave Obama is eliciting and building is well suited to the making of watershed environmental policy.  Environmental laws as significant as a federal climate legislation do not happen without an extraordinary public demand, and leadership that is able to step outside the incremental trench warfare style of Washington lawmaking.   Most of the massive edifice of American environmental law rests upon a foundation of "movement" politics, broad-based demands coming from outside political elites that forced Washington to take notice.  The National Environmental Policy Act (1970), Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972),  and the Endangered Species (1973) were all a direct political result of the upsurge in environmental political awareness that occurred in the late 1960s and early 70s, a movement that was linked to, and derived energy from, overlapping movements in civil rights, women's rights, and opposition to an ill-considered and destructive war.   Without the winds of a broad political movement to back it, environmental laws - which are often perceived as threatening to business interests with enormous access and sway over elected official -- fundamental changes is extremely difficult.  

Global warming is the most politically difficult problem than all those that American environmentalism has faced before.  Despite those trend stories about how many businesses now favor national GHG controls (and many do), the forces resisting meaningful action on GHG remain broad and powerful.   What is needed is national leadership able both the catalyze and give effect to public demand for national policy that will give us a reasonable chance of avoiding the worst impacts of the greenhouse effect.  

Even Barack Obama, should he win, will need to be prodded to keep the climate at the top of a crowded agenda of his new administration.  But no other candidate is better positioned or better suited to take on the climate problem that has so long been ignored at the federal level, and help us find our way to a future in which prosperity and a livable planet are no longer on a collision course.  

I would be interested in hearing from those who disagree; i.e., who think that (other considerations that make his election highly undesirable aside), that McCain would be the best Climate President in practice -- perhaps on the theory that he'd be able to strong-arm Republicans more effectively -- or who believe Hillary Clinton's contacts and experience would make her the best for the troposphere. Or those who think "climate voters" should be secretly wishing for a bloody convention battle the only solution to which is to annoint the author of An Inconvenient Truth as the nominee.

Sean H. Donahue

"Diplomacy," for example, sounds beautiful.  But the subject already proved divisive with Hillary a while back, and it will be at least as divisive in the general election, when he has to talk to the pro-military national-security conservatives.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

   On environmental issues, a slight edge to Clinton, on immigration a slight edge to Obama, on Iraq, nothing great from either of them.

   (And NO!, I don't care about how they voted in the past, I care about what they would do when they took office, and neither is really great there).

   I have no interest in debating their ad strategies (tastes great, less filling).  

   Show me the issues!!!

patrick in Beijing