I Believe This is What The Republicans Should Be Hammered On.

[Uncle Joe]

Much more on link.

The Green Gap: Republican Candidates and Climate Change

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3922730&page=1

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When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on Nov. 18 containing an almost apocalyptic vision of what is likely to ensue unless the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions begins as soon as five years from now, the GOP presidential candidates were quiet.

Instead, the Democrats appear to have co-opted the issue of climate change, in no small part due to Al Gore's association with the issue through his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which won an Oscar this year, and the Bush administration's early position as a global warming skeptic. Also, the Democratic presidential candidates regularly, if often, generally talk about the issue.

The risk for the Republicans is that moderate Republican voters and independents who are concerned about global warming could come to see it as "a Democratic issue" -- one on which the Democratic candidates are seen as more forceful and concerned -- come November 2008. There could develop what Time magazine's Washington political editor Ana Marie Cox called "the green gap" between the two parties.

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Last spring, Thompson seemed to mock the issue, writing in the National Review Online that warming on other planets led some to "wonder if Mars and Jupiter, nonsignatories to the Kyoto treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle." More recently, as a presidential candidate, he has said global warming is real.

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