What role has Congress played in addressing climate change?
Socci: It’s become a topic of discussion more broadly within Congress than it ever has been before. It’s typically been largely a Democratic issue, but that’s not to say that there haven’t been some really Republican folks who’ve really dug into this issue, like John McCain, [Maine Sen.] Olympia Snowe, to name a couple. The discussion has become more serious in this last year, and it got to the point with the Lieberman-Warner bill making it to the floor — it never did get debated because it didn’t get the necessary votes to overcome the roadblocks to a full debate. But many people would say that it’s the first step in a much larger discussion. It puts a marker down. Q. Is climate change a priority for Congress right now, considering that the country’s attention is primarily focused on the election and high food and gasoline prices? Socci: I hate to pull all those issues apart. I don’t think you can separate climate change from energy, first of all. The whole point of this discussion a
