We’re watching Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Q&A right now with conference attendees. We’ll be interviewing Pelosi later this morning and hope to have the video of that interview posted this afternoon.
There’s also rumors of a surprise guest speaker here. Stay tuned.
Late Update: Al Gore will be appearing shortly.
Later Update: A stirring reception for Gore, as you might expect. We hope to snag him, too, for TPMtv.
It occurs to me watching Gore speak on global warming how stunted the political debate on climate change remains in this country. In less than six months, no matter who is elected, we’ll have a President who acknowledges the seriousness of the threat of climate change. We’ll finally have the opportunity — years if not decades overdue — to begin to piece together a legislative response to global warming. But think for a moment about how little discussion there is of what those legislative fixes ought to be.
Whoever is elected will not arrive in the Oval Office with a mandate on specific measures to take because there is no such public consensus or even emerging consensus. In fact, the debate on what to do and how to do it will only be then just beginning. That’s not to say that lobbyists for interested parties are not already well underway in preparing for that debate. They would not be very good at their jobs if they didn’t already have a pretty good idea of what legislation is likely to get passed on this issue in 2009.
When it comes right down to it, the campaign to deny the existence of global warming, to undermine the science, to slow-roll the political response has been wildly successful. Here is Gore, the world’s leading spokesperson on the issue, who began his speech here asking us to internalize the idea that the Arctic icecap is disappearing (rapidly), still being forced to be a clarion on the very existence of the problem. It’s sad.
