All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

A poll released today by the Associated Press finds that many Americans believe that taking steps to slow global warming would create jobs and boost the economy, despite some Republicans' insistence that the opposite is true.

According to the poll results, 40 percent of the American public believes that efforts to reduce global warming pollution would create jobs, and 46 percent believe that addressing climate change would boost the economy. Less than one in three said taking steps to address global warming would hurt the economy and mean fewer jobs.

In addition, three in four say they would support some kind of climate change legislation. But they are unwilling to spend their own money to make it happen: a majority, 59 percent, said they would not support a cap-and-trade bill if it meant having to pay $10 more for electricity each month.

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With world leaders debating how to address climate change in Copenhagen and the U.S. Senate poised to take up a climate bill in the coming months, a new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that just 37 percent of Americans believe the issue should be a priority for government leaders.

That's a significant drop from April of 2007, when 52 percent of those surveyed said the issue should be a high priority.

A majority of Americans (70 percent) do consider global warming to be a "serious problem." But nearly two in three either see it as "not serious" (23 percent overall) or a serious problem but not a high priority (33 percent).

In April of 2007, just 8 percent of Americans said global warming was not serious.

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Wednesday's "Washington Unplugged" featured a discussion of the so-called "Climategate" scandal and its potential impact on the Climate Change conference now taking place in Copenhagen.

One of the stolen emails at the root of "Climategate" shows that Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England was attempting to cover the fact that tree ring data has actually showed a cooling trend since 1960.

These leaked emails have critics up in arms, among them Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.). He spoke with CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews on Wednesday's Washington Unplugged. "It shows that they're hiding data," he said. "It shows that they're suppressing opposition. They're fudging data."

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Former Vice President Al Gore said today that the evidence of global warming is unequivocal and that those who claim otherwise -- such as Sarah Palin -- "persist in an air of unreality."

Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed today that President Obama should boycott the United Nations summit on global warming in Copenhagen because the issue has become politicized. In a recent Facebook post, she called climate science "junk science and doomsday scare tactics."

Gore hit back at Palin and other global warming skeptics on MSNBC today.

"The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our eyes," Gore said. "What do they think is happening?"

The discovery that CO2 traps heat was made 150 years ago, Gore points out. He adds: "That is a principle in physics. It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists."

"The scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal," he said.

The Republican party has "gotten into a global warming denier posture," Gore said, even though the issue should not be political.

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CBS News has confirmed that President Obama will attend the United Nations climate change summit next month in Copenhagen, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Obama will be in Denmark on December 9 for the summit, which is expected to have at least 65 world leaders, according to the Associated Press. It was unknown until now whether Mr. Obama would attend the meeting, which is designed to create a new global treaty on climate change.

The president's visit to Copenhagen comes just before he heads to Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize the following day.

To hear world leaders and others addressing the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, the threat could not be more real and the need more urgent to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

But in stark contrast to the earnest statements is the carbon footprint associated with their gathering.

It happens every autumn: midtown Manhattan becomes the motorcade capital of the world. Each foreign leader in town has a convoy of vehicles. Some of them, like President Obama's motorcade, are 20-to-30 vehicles in length. It's so long - it seems that when the front of it reaches the U.N., the back end is still back at his hotel.

Exacerbating the annual exercise in diplomatic gridlock are police actions, blocking intersections and closing streets for security to facilitate motorcade movements. It renders countless other vehicles immobile while waiting for motorcades to pass, their engines idling but still blowing exhaust into the midtown air

Does it undermine the goal of the climate change summit and cause the pledges of environmental concern to ring hollow?

Asked about it, White House climate change negotiator Todd Sterns had a suggestion.

"I think the U.N. should make a pledge to electric vehicle motorcades within five years," he said.

Right. As soon as all U.N. diplomats pay their parking tickets.

Obama: It's "New Era" on Climate Change Policy
Obama's U.N. Debut: A Dizzying Agenda

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Mark Knoller is a CBS News White House correspondent. You can read more of his posts in Hotsheet here. You can also follow him on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/markknoller.

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President Obama devoted his debut at the United Nations with an address on climate change, calling it a "new era" and touting his administration's record since he took office in January.

"It is true that for too many years, mankind has been slow to respond to or even recognize the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country as well," Mr. Obama said at a climate change forum hosted by United Nation Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. "But this is a new day. It is a new era. And I am proud to say that the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history."

In an effort to combat some international criticism of U.S. efforts, Mr. Obama pointed to what he called the U.S.'s "largest ever investment in renewable energy" as well as actions taken to increase fuel economy in automobiles and the energy bill that passed the House in June, but has yet to be discussed in the Senate.

"These steps represent an historic recognition on behalf of the American people and their government. We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations," he added.

Before Mr. Obama spoke, Ban Ki-moon called on the 100 world leaders assembled "to accelerate the pace of negotations" to get a new global agreement at an upcoming summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, later this year.

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This story was filed by CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk from the United Nations.

President Barack Obama makes his debut at the United Nations this week, giving his first address to the U.N. General Assembly and, presiding over a Security Council meeting – the first time a U.S. president will have done so.

Left: The U.N. Security Council

He is expected to be received with open arms by a diplomatic corps, which sees him as an agent of change in U.S. policy from confrontation to negotiation. It sounds like he may even receive a standing ovation from the 120 heads of state and government.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice gave a hint of his four priorities: nonproliferation (read: Iran and North Korea), peacekeeping, development, and climate change. Also on his agenda are international criminal networks, cyber attacks, terrorism and genocide.

President Obama is likely to emphasize the pressing need for global disarmament and nonproliferation and the interest of the U.S. in strengthening the role of U.N. peacekeepers – or blue helmets – rather than being the world’s policemen.

But he certainly won’t be doing all that and more in his 15-minute speech to world leaders. Rather, he has a dizzying set of meetings set up, all with varying agendas. Just a week ago, the White House announced that the president would address the U.N. Climate Change Summit, meet with Sub-Saharan African leaders, hold a U.S. meeting for U.N. peacekeepers, and have bilateral meetings with the leaders of Japan, China and Russia.

Then, to add another “first” to the list, President Obama will be the first U.S. president to chair a U.N. Security Council special session (because the U.S. happens to hold the rotating Presidency for the month of September) with heads of state (including Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, since Libya is on the Security Council now) on nonproliferation and disarmament and will introduce a resolution (which presumably has been negotiated to pass) calling on all countries with nuclear arms to abandon their weapons.

That was not enough. President Obama added a U.S.-led, three-way meeting on the Middle East with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in order to revive stalled peace talks – a meeting that echoes Jimmy Carter's bringing together of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin 30 years ago.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is moving closer toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is questioning the science behind its decisions.

The business group wants the EPA to hold a public hearing -- with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge -- to decide whether the agency is using sound science to declare that humans are primarily causing global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In April, the EPA proposed a ruling to declare greenhouse gases a cause of global warming and a threat to public welfare. After opening up the ruling to public comment for 60 days, the agency is now set to formally declare its ruling, which was based on peer-reviewed scientific analysis.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson proposed the ruling after completing the scientific review ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007, when it ruled that the agency has the authority to regulate emissions from vehicles.

The EPA's ruling said "elevated greenhouse gas concentrations are the primary result of human activities," and it called the U.S. transportation sector is a "significant contributor" to U.S. and global carbon emissions.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is relaxing the timeline for climate change and energy legislation, a reflection of the challenge Congress will have meeting its own deadlines.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat, pushed back the deadline for the measure to Sept. 28, giving 10 extra days to the six different committees working on climate change and energy policy, ClimateWire reported.

With health care legislation still in development and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings about to begin next week, the Senate will likely have little time for energy policy this summer.

The House of Representatives last month passed a comprehensive bill that creates a cap and trade system for polluting emissions, but the Senate is very unlikely to accept the legislation as the House prepared it. The Senate is likely to change a provision that imposes a tariff on certain goods from countries that are not also limiting their own global warming emissions. President Obama has said he opposes the tariff as well.

Furthermore, even though the House made a number of concessions to polluting industries -- agreeing to give away as much as 85 percent of the cap and trade permits to companies, rather than putting them up for auction -- moderate Senate Democrats like Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) say the price on carbon is still too extreme.

"I’m going to make people, my friends on the left, very unhappy and I’m going to make those who don’t think global warming is real very unhappy because I’m probably going to be working with a group of moderates in the middle to try to come up with a bill that doesn’t punish coal-dependent states like Missouri," McCaskill said Wednesday on a radio show. "We need to be a leader in the world, but we don’t want to be a sucker. And if we go too far with this, all we’re going to do is chase more jobs to China and India, where they’ve been putting up coal-fired plants every ten minutes."

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