The gas guzzlers muzzled

The coming change in leadership of a key Senate committee could finally help the US get its head out of the sand on climate change, writes Ed Pilkington Wednesday November 15, 2006Guardian Unlimited
Within the glorified game of musical chairs that will take place on January 3, when the Democrats finally take control of Congress, one of the more interesting changeovers has largely gone unnoticed.
It involves a change in the leadership of one of the Senate committees, the Senate environmental public works committee. And in years to come, it could be looked back on as a shift of supreme significance.
There is a clue to how seminal this change of hands is in the power bases of the two relevant parties. The committee's outgoing Republican chairman, James Inhofe, comes from Oklahoma, bang in the heartland of America; in the plains, where farming, the gun and the pickup truck form a holy trinity.

The incoming Democrat, Barbara Boxer, comes from, yes, California, a state that has supplied several of the leaders of the Democrat revolution, including Nanci Pelosi of San Francisco, the new speaker of the House.
So power has shifted at the head of this committee from Republican to Democrat, man to woman, conservative heartland to liberal coast. Most importantly, though, the change of hands marks the transition from global warming denial to global warming activism.
Mr Inhofe has a track record for using his power in committee to block legislation designed to cut the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. He famously said on one occasion that global warming was "the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people".
Ms Boxer, by contrast, made a clarion call to action on the day after the midterm elections, saying that under her tutelage the committee would devote itself to moving forward on cutting emissions.
"Time is running out, and we need to move forward on this," she said, noting that many individual states - including her own California under (strange bedfellow, this) Arnold Schwarzenegger - were doing far more than the federal government to tackle the crisis.
The switch has sent understandable paroxysms of disbelief and joy through America's nascent environmentalist movement. This is the moment eco-activists, concentrated on the two coasts and centred on California and New York, barely dared to hope for in one of only two countries in the world with governments that refused to sign the Kyoto treaty. (The other one is Australia.)
"It's like a tsunami has hit the committee," said Karen Steuer of the Washington-based charity the National Environmental Trust in language that is not uncharacteristic of the reaction. "You can't find two members, or people, more ideologically different."
The thing is, though, that Mr Inhofe did a very efficient job in driving his political beliefs into reality. America has remained, partly through his leadership, in the distinguished position of being the world's leading polluter, and the nation doing the least to combat the ominous consequences of its actions.
During the Inhofe period in power, Congress has done little to curb the gas-guzzling SUVs (six miles a gallon), has flirted with the idea of drilling for oil in the Arctic and has allowed the Bush administration to put a wet blanket on to international efforts to fight global warming.
The challenge for Ms Boxer is for her new-style committee to be just as effective as her predecessor's, but in the opposite direction. It won't be easy. As the New York Times has noted, with the Democrats' majority in the Senate as slender as it could possibly be, at just two seats, Ms Boxer and her colleagues could find it difficult to get their way without securing a Republican consensus.
So none of the environmental groups is crying victory quite yet. With scientific evidence mounting that action needs to be taken over the next few years if self-perpetuating global warming is to be avoided, there is a deepening sense of urgency coupled with doubts about the Democrats' ability to get the job done.
Still, it would be churlish for the environmentalists to belittle what for them is, at the very least, a huge step in the right direction. This is truly a momentous shift, from the backward-looking denier from Oklahoma to the determined activist from California.