My Two-Month Late Earth Day Piece

As you all know, hurricane season started on Thursday, and I'm trying to get into the spirit of the season. I'm singing hurricane carols. I'm trying to be nice and not naughty so that the hurricane fairy will come down my chimney and obliterate it. I do think they've started putting up the decorations early this year. I was seeing cars in the trees back in May. And of course, New Orleans never took down their decorations from last hurricane season. Talk about lazy.

But I would like to note that the White House apparently is full of hurricane season cheer as well, since they just nominated one a' them enviro-wackos to be the next Treasury Secretary:

Many green leaders joined the Washington establishment and Big Business this week in applauding President Bush's nomination of Henry "Hank" Paulson -- Wall Street titan and heavyweight conservationist -- to replace outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow and spearhead the administration's economic policy making. But while Paulson proved popular in many circles, a handful of right-wing groups bristled at the pick, claiming that Paulson's pro-environment views were too radical.

Much vaunted as chair of the investment firm Goldman Sachs since 1999, Paulson is less known for his role at The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation organization. He joined the group's board of directors in 2001 and now serves as board chair. TNC President and CEO Steve McCormick hails Paulson as "a voice for environmental issues at the highest levels of business and government. His mark on the conservancy is indelible. He has helped us think big -- very big -- about our conservation ambitions."

Paulson believes environmental health and financial well-being are inextricably linked. "The environment and the economy have been totally misconstrued as incompatible," he told Muckraker in an interview earlier this year. "They are opposite sides of the same coin -- you can't consider one without the other."

We're in a new Gilded Age in America where nothing will really get done until Big Business is on board. Just as they will drive the eventual push toward universal health care in order to stay competitive globally, so are they our best hope to stem the tide of global warming. Under Paulson, Goldman Sachs invested over a billion dollars in alternative energy, committed the company to a steep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and donated almost a million acres in southern Chile to a wildlife society. And remember, the last head of Goldman Sachs was Jon Corzine, now the Democratic governor of New Jersey, and Paulson's improved on his efforts.

I don't think Treasury is much of a policy position anymore, so Paulson's contribution to the overall US strategy on climate change will likely be infinitesimal. This analyst agrees:

"Keep in mind that the Bush administration's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, also had strong environmental convictions, but he fought battle after losing battle to get his superiors to take these issues seriously, and was effectively shut down," said David Sandalow, an environmental and foreign-policy scholar with the Brookings Institution.

In The Price of Loyalty, O'Neill describes a memo he sent to Bush in February 2001 with advice on developing a climate-change strategy. Needless to say, it had no impact.

But the more members of the inner circle that have an understanding of our environmental impact, the better.

I have not yet seen An Inconvenient Truth but it is getting a lot of exposure, and global warming does appear to be a part of the national conversation as much as it ever has been. I noted last week that we wouldn't see major policy speeches by Presidential candidates devoted to this issue in the recent past.

This is all good news. But there is such a resistance to change since we don't see the effects of global warming as tangibly as, say, higher gas prices (although it's been 90+ degrees in my workplace for what seems like two months). The quicker that business sees the environment not as an opponent but a partner, the sooner that resistance will be broken. But there is another major hurdle, which I will explore in my next post.