By Steve Thomas

One of the impressions I brought back from the recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference at Stanford was that journalists are very optimistic that the United States House and Senate will be able to reconcile their differences and present President Bush with an energy bill.  They seemed to think this would happen sooner, rather than later, and gave credit to the very high levels of concern in the country over global warming and the environment. The vast majority – if not all the journalists I talked to – believe that the science is settled and unassailable when it comes to global warming and they feel the public feels the same way. So it makes sense to try to do something about it.

Some of the optimism was apparent in a session called “Californians on the Front Lines: The Shifting Politics of the Environment.” This session was moderated by Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post and participants on the panel included Congressman Jay Inslee of Washington State, Fabian Nunez, speaker of the California Assembly, Dorothy Rothrock from the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, Stuart Leavenworth of the Sacramento Bee and Andrew Light of the University of Washington.

While there were a variety of views represented on the panel, the bottom line was a grudging acknowledgement that California probably cannot continue to go it alone forever when it comes to pursuing serious energy efficiency goals.  They are going to need some help from Washington, D.C. and they are going to need more states to start to take serious steps to address climate change and the environment if they are going to stay competitive long term.  Serious national energy efficiency goals, combined with incentives for renewable energy and some type of cap and trade system for carbon emissions would be a big step in the right direction.

My sense is that journalists were willing to accept some compromises in order to get most of what people think we need now – rather than waiting and hoping for a different administration to spur things on in a couple of years.  In other words, there are enough areas of overlap between the two bills passed by the House and the Senate to get something worthwhile in the short term – and there’s too much public pressure for the politicians to sit by doing nothing in Washington.

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