Coral Davenport
NationalJournal.com
11/3/2010
…For the past three years, the nation’s most influential green groups – among them the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Council – joined forces in an estimated $300 million campaign to push the most ambitious environmental policy ever: enacting a cap-and-trade emissions law that would fundamentally transform the nation’s energy economy…
…The big green groups will change from offense to defense. They’ll do it with a stealth campaign that includes new messages, targets, tactics and allies, and, they hope, a lot more money.
The biggest pivot: Instead of media campaigns about saving the planet from global warming, look for public health pitches aimed at saving children from asthma, pregnant women from mercury poisoning, and small communities from the pollution of specific, local coal plants — such as thick, heavy coal ash. Watch for ads attacking Republicans who would seek to dismantle the Clean Air Act that regulates those pollutants. Even though the ads might not mention climate change, that’s what they’ll be about.
The strategy is twofold: change the message from something broad and abstract to something concrete and tangible — and defend the newest front in the climate change battle. In the coming Congress, lawmakers from both parties plan to mount an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency as it uses new authority under the Clean Air Act to roll out a slew of regulations on carbon emissions and other pollutants….
To read more go to NationalJournal.com
H/T Tom Nelson
