Once again, the Bush Administration's search for a Treasury Secretary had led it to a businessman who doesn't share the Administration's own taste for deep denial on global warming. Treasury Secretary-designate Hank Paulson, like Paul O'Neill (Bush's first choice for the post back in 2001), is on public record as strongly supporting Kyoto and believing that global warming is a serious problem on which the U.S. needs to exercise leadership.
The deep denial lobby got rid of O'Neill; now they are out to block, or at least badly wound, Paulson. Their attack began before Bush even announced the nomination, but it is accelerating today; Human Events is calling it "a Harriet Myers moment."
Bush has had no problem finding EPA Administrators (after Whitman) or Energy Secretaries who can calmly look at melting glaciers or Katrina and say, "Hey, that's just your imagination." So at first blush it's odd that he can't seem to get a Treasury Secretary who shares that gift. Perhaps it's because two traits are essential for someone who's going to do the Treasury job: an appetite for managing and minimizing (not reveling in) risk and an aversion to cooking the books. Global warming denial, at its heart, violates both of those precepts. To deny global warming, you have to love the idea of risking the entire planet to maintain profit margins on oil and big SUVs, and you have to be willing to ignore the numbers and hide the costs.
So it shouldn't be surprising that anyone who is prudent enough that the world's markets will trust him to run the U.S. Treasury would also be prudent enough to think that global warming is a big enough risk that we need to minimize it. Paulson fits in this category -- and he may bring enough clout to the job to force Bush to move beyond global warming denial. The President has already admitted that we are addicted to oil -- he may be ready to admit that one of the costly effects of that addiction is destabilization of the world's climate.
And Americans seem to be realizing this in ever larger numbers. This weekend Vice-President Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, began opening in commercial theatres, and it did the biggest box-office per screen of any documentary ever (and of any movie this year). Meanwhile, four more universities around the country have joined the effort to demonstrate campus leadership on global warming by committing to renewable, clean energy. Fuqua School of Business, Duke University (North Carolina), Central Oregon Community College (Oregon), Bowdoin College (Maine) and UC Santa Cruz (California) have all committed that between 75 to 100 percent of their electricity will come from renewable sources.
Then of course, there is the utterly cynical General Motors effort to maintain market share for Hummers by offering to compensate purchasers for the higher price of gas -- literally subsidizing and encouraging its customers to increase our oil addiction. (Note -- GM often claims that its solution to oil dependence is a higher gas tax -- but when gas prices go up, look at how it behaves.) New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has written a savage attack on this caper (subscription required), calling GM the most dangerous company to America's future, comparing it to "a crack dealer looking to keep his addicts on a tight leash," and arguing that "the sooner this company gets taken over by Toyota, the better off our country will be."
And on a lighter note, the Detroit Free Press lampooned the President's efforts to pretend that he wants to improve fuel efficiency with this truly priceless cartoon, referring to the Sierra Club's suit against the proposed new rules which actually weaken fuel standards