I know it’s a bit early to give out this week’s coveted Green Weenie, having just given it to Tom Friedman on Sunday, but I can declare this week’s competition over already: Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, has blown away the competition with Usain Bolt-like speed in his op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal arguing that conservatives and Republicans need to jump on board the climate change bandwagon.
This represents one of the leaders of the climate campaign saying “No mas!” By the way, does anyone in the climate campaign yet recognize that if John McCain had won the 2008 election, we’d probably have some form of cap and trade under way by now? (More on this below.)
Krupp, whom one environmental leader once characterized to me as “the Richard Nixon of the environmental movement,” is tacitly acknowledging that the climate campaign’s preferred strategy of ramming through climate legislation in the same partisan way Obama rammed through Obamacare has failed. Back in 2006 I reported in National Review about a meeting the climateers held in Aspen (naturally) where, according to the conference report, strategists recommended that “the only way to proceed is to exercise raw political power, wake up the public about the urgent nature of the issue, create a major public demand for action comparable to that which stimulated major environmental legislation in the 1970s, pursue outright victory at the polls.” In other words, we need to boot out those evil Republicans and roll over them. (I don’t have the attendance list handy just now, but I am reasonably confident Krupp was one of the attendees.)
