Dems give up on climate change legislation

Soon after I learned that the Senate Democratic leadership, surely with Obama's blessing, had given up on trying to pass any meaningful sort of climate change legislation, I got another email from Organizing for America — asking for donations to support the Dems.

Hah! I thought. Bad timing.

I was so irked at the meek and weak "we give up without even trying" attitude of the Democratic leadership in Washington I vowed to put my financial support into Oregon politics.

If we can keep Republican Chris Dudley from becoming governor and elect John Kitzhaber, that'll ease the pain of watching the Dems blow their best chance at saving our planet from global warming catastrophe. 

Think globally and act locally. Given the disappointing performance of Obama on energy and environmental issues, what else can green-minded progressives do?

Climate Progress, one of my favorite web sites, takes Obama to task for — amazingly — blaming environmentalists for the demise of climate change legislation. That's ridiculous.

On the  political front, the White House  deserves most of the blame for not getting Republicans.  Why?  Because  the White House never tried to keep moderate Democrats in line, never made  it clear that there was definitely gonna be a vote on this bill and the moderates should figure out what they needed to support the bill (as in the case of healthcare reform).

I can attest to the fact that  the entire environmental and clean energy and progressive political community worked  round-the-clock over the past year.  If the White House and Obama had worked as hard on this most important of issues, we very likely would have had a price on carbon, I believe.

However, in another post Climate Progress makes clear that 90% of the blame needs to go to (1) anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues who spread misinformation and poisoned debate, and (2) the media for their generally enabling coverage of the ideologues.

It still hurts that the other 10% of Blame Game scoring deserves to be given to Obama and the Democratic leadership. No wonder the above-mentioned post is titled, "The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part I."

Progressives and environmentalists expected a lot more from the 2008 election.

If the Dems are paralyzed on passing climate change legislation when they have 59 votes in the Senate, the BP oil spill shows the danger of our dependence on fossil fuels, and fostering green energy technologies is an obvious way of stimulating the U.S. economy out of its doldrums, then when are they ever going to get moving?

Organizing for America keeps asking me for money, since my wife and I contributed generously to Obama's campaign. Well, they can keep on asking, and I'll enjoy continuing to delete their emails.

I can forgive Obama for not following through on some of his presidential campaign promises, but failing to act to preserve our planet's habitability for my granddaughter isn't one of them.

(A weenie "scaled-down" bill doesn't count.)