Looks like the enthusiasm of several governors for tackling global warming, and viewing it through the prism of local effects, is starting to get contagious:
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- States should develop creative approaches to climate change, just as they have with challenges such as health care, despite their different economic interests, governors said Saturday."No individual state is going to solve the climate change problem, but we can do our part," Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said. "In the absence of national or international consensus or progress, we have the opportunity to show the way."
Talks on state-level climate policy were planned for the annual National Governors Association meeting this weekend at a resort on Lake Michigan, where receding water levels have touched off debate over the effects of global warming on the Great Lakes.
It's true that talk about action and finding common solutions is just that on a level, and the article goes on to note that the governors of Michigan and West Virginia in particular stressed a more slow-going approach out of sensitivity to local industry concerns.
Still, the governors do seem, as a matter of consensus, to have firmly embraced the general validity and necessity of states taking the lead on climate change in the absence of federal action. At the very least, that sort of agreement says something significant to those in the administration and Congress who had hoped to keep this entirely bottled up at the national level.
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