The mid term election results in the US are almost certainly bad news for the country’s stuttering efforts to tackle climate change. One of the key tenets of the Tea Party movement is that climate change, like the theory of evolution, is a liberal conspiracy to blah blah blah.
One of the interesting comments to come out of the White House in the aftermath is that the two main parties could work together on “energy independence”. This sounds like a clever piece of ‘green jujitsu’. Instead of arguing over the whys and wherefores of the science of climate change again, the jujitsu approach is to reframe the argument into one which your opponent can’t refuse. Given oil production in the US peaked many decades ago, the best route to energy independence looks like renewables and energy efficiency which happen to be the key tools in the fight against climate change. The Tea Party will see this as a patriotic effort to protect the land of the free from pesky foreign interference, the Democrats (or most of them anyway) will see it as an attempt to cut carbon. Win-win.