Women Lead the Climate Change Fight

This is an excerpt from two longer reports in Ms. magazine. To get the whole story, visit www.msmagazine.com for subscription information.

Just shy of the anniversary of Rachel Carson's 100th birthday, and almost 50 years after she wrote the book that helped launch the environmental movement -- Silent Spring -- U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that polar bears might become extinct. But he didn't say why.

Film producer and climate-change leader Laurie David knows why the bears are endangered. So does the first woman to chair the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer, and so does the first woman Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi: It's global warming. These women also know that our fate is linked to the polar bear's. And the polar bear is in serious trouble.

The U.S. government under President George W. Bush has refused to acknowledge that human activities are causing global warming. The administration has bullied government scientists, limiting their ability to speak freely about climate change. That censorship policy came to the nation's attention when James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the country's top experts on climate change, fought back when the administration tried to muzzle him. Yet the administration's gag rule remains in effect.

Will a change in U.S. leadership -- led by powerful women -- begin to reverse the dire direction in which we're headed?

When Barbara Boxer took over as chair of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee in January 2007, she replaced Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who still calls the threat of catastrophic global warming "a hoax." Boxer, though, has made stopping global warming her top legislative priority. Among other efforts, she has cosponsored legislation with Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) to cut emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. This would be an important step toward averting climate change's most severe impacts. (The House has a similar bill, sponsored by California Rep. Henry Waxman.)

In the House, Boxer's efforts are mirrored by those of Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). One of the first things she did after becoming Speaker was to create the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which is holding hearings and jump-starting legislation on greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy and Commerce committee will then be asked to draft bills based on its recommendations.

"I am really glad Nancy is working to get a special committee to focus on this," said Boxer. "My plate is very full trying to get something done on the Senate side, where we have had a tremendous amount of hostility both from Senate colleagues and the Bush administration. ... But now we have a little wind at our back."

As the Senate and House work on global-warming legislation, climate-change activism has been growing. But will it ever be a mass movement? If it's up to Laurie David, it will. "This has to become the biggest movement this country has ever seen," says the coproducer of An Inconvenient Truth As part of her own movement-building efforts, she's taken a "Stop Global Warming College Tour" to campuses in 12 cities along with singer-activist Sheryl Crow.

"The critical thing is how long it is going to take," David continues. "There's a window closing on really doing meaningful things to slow down global warming. You don't have to do everything, but you do have to do something. Everyone has to do something."

Does flipping a light switch matter? David thinks so. "Turning off the light is a step to saving a polar bear. If everyone changed a lightbulb, choosing a compact fluorescent lightbulb over an incandescent one" -- thus releasing 150 fewer pounds of CO2 annually into the atmosphere -- "it would be significant."