Year 2, Month 6, Day 9: Only Nixon Could Go To China?

Erstwhile climate zombie Chris Christie (NJ-GOV) has apparently seen the light. Or seen something, anyway. He’s simultaneously asserting that climate change is real (and anthropogenic!) while withdrawing New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans yesterday to pull the Garden State out of the nation’s only operating cap-and-trade system, spurring environmental anger, conservative cheers and speculation about his national ambitions.

It also stirred confusion about the governor’s legal authority and what will happen to the carbon trading program, which caps utility carbon dioxide emissions in 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, at a time when national climate legislation appears dead on Capitol Hill.

At a news conference in Trenton, N.J., the Republican governor said he believed after months of study and meetings with scientists that humans were causing climate change and that his government needed to put policies in place to curb warming temperatures. That is a shift from last year, when Christie expressed doubts about the science behind global warming.

It’s a little like the joke about your mother-in-law driving off the cliff in your new Cadillac. Except that I love my mother-in-law, and Cadillacs (at least the ones I’ve driven) are overpriced and grotesque pieces of shit.

Sent May 27:

New Jersey’s Governor Christie’s sudden readiness to embrace climate facts while rejecting any climate action is a real headscratcher. The governor may be trying to appease environmentalists with a verbal gesture while mollifying his corporatist base with something more substantial. It’s barely possible that his withdrawal from the RGGI’s cap-and-trade policy will balance his acknowledgment of climate change with the paranoid and anti-science tea-partiers who hold the key to Republican primary success in 2012. It is a sad commentary on the state of our contemporary politics that a politician’s public recognition of a genuine threat to our civilization cannot be heard unless it’s couched in the cynical language of short-term political expediency. It would be splendid if Mr. Christie were able to convince the rabidly anti-science Republican base of the facts of climate change; even better would be the news that he’d succeeded in changing the minds of his corporate sponsors.

Warren Senders