Julia Bovey's Blog
Dear Senator Kerry: We're on the same side.
December 13, 2007
Posted by Julia Bovey in U.S. Law and Policy
“No fighting, no hitting, no yelling and do not come downstairs!” I told my children this evening, “Mommy has a very important phone call.” They knew I meant business.
Unable to get a last-minute babysitter, I parked the kids in front of PBS Kids and prayed they wouldn’t make a peep during my conference call with Sen. John Kerry.
Kerry joined the call breathless having run back to his office seconds after casting his vote for the victorious energy bill. I watched him vote on C-Span II (we have another TV downstairs) and 10 seconds later he was on the phone. How important is the energy bill you ask? NRDC will release new analysis tomorrow showing that the bill’s provision to make the average new car in America get 35 mph will be even more effective than we imagined in slowing global warming and breaking America’s addiction to oil.
Kerry was on the call to talk about recent developments with some folks who blog about climate change, specifically Bali and the energy bill victory. But I had let his folks know in advance that I planned to ask him about the subject of my blog post from yesterday: the $25 billion for nuclear loan guarantees in the appropriations bill that is about to be sprung on us. I wanted to ask him about it NOT because I wanted to give him a hard time, but because I believe he has the power to actually DO something about it. He’s Senator John Kerry.
But that’s not how it went down. In fact, it went down badly, as is detailed in this description in Gristmill.
To Kerry, clearly I sounded hostile. Accusatory. This was not meant to be the case. I mean, he and I are supposed to agree, right? John Kerry wants to protect the environment. I want to protect the environment. John Kerry wants to stop global warming. I want to stop global warming. John Kerry works in Washington to try to make the world better. I work in Washington to try to make the world better. John Kerry thought he was the best candidate to be President in 2004. I thought he was the best candidate to be President in 2004. So I made a quip thinking that he would think it was coming from someone on the same team. He did not think it was from someone on the same team. He thought it was rude. He thought it was blaming.
But to me this speaks to a larger disconnect and defensiveness that’s happening now in the environmental community trying to fight the fight in the Nation’s Capital. Here in Washington, we are far more focused on what divides us than what unites us lately. People who agree that, for instance, global warming pollution should be reduced 80% by 2050 seem to believe they are diametrically opposed on solving global warming because one believes in a carbon tax and the other believes in a cap and trade system. That’s Washington. There’s no longer much feeling of a shared mission among those who would execute differently on any one detail of a plan. So, I guess it's no wonder that Sen. Kerry thought I was attacking him.
All of this is put in perspective for me by something very upsetting and disturbing I saw in the New York Times today. It was a photo of so-called eco jeans. Apparently the maker of these jeans suggests they are best laundered in the shower, with shampoo… while the washer is actually wearing the jeans. I’m not making this up.My take away: there are people out there who want to protect the planet so badly that there is a market for $295 blue jeans that you must wash with shampoo while wearing them in the shower. Here in Washington, the goal should be to translate that desire – that caused someone to invent and someone else to buy those stupid jeans – into solutions.
Today a real solution happened in the form of a new mpg standard for cars sold in America. It’s a huge day, a huge step forward. But for me it will go down as the day that I talked to John Kerry assuming he knew that we were on the same side, but he assumed that we weren’t.
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