The Road from Bali

December 19, 2007, 10:00am – 11:00am

About This Event

After years of denial, delay, distraction and distortion, climate change is changing the political climate. Australia's John Howard recently became the first national leader voted out of office in large measure because of his failure to respond to citizens' concerns about global warming. Newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made global warming his first priority in office. Australia's awakening is not an isolated example. Eighty-three percent of Chinese support action on climate change. Between 2006 and 2010 China plans to improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. The dialogue in the United States is also shifting, albeit too slowly. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now endorse taking major steps soon to combat global warming, and 33 percent more think we need modest steps. Unfortunately this 92 percent of the American public is still looking to President Bush for action on this key issue.

Just last week representatives of more than 180 nations met in Bali to chart a course toward a new global agreement to control climate change that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Together - in spite of American obstruction - they produced a roadmap for the new climate negotiations that set a target date of 2009 for the next treaty. How do we avoid the missteps that plagued the Kyoto Treaty? How do we create a framework that includes industrialized nations as well as the developing world? Sen. Kerry - who attended the Bali conference and lead the U.S. Senate delegation - will lay out a strategy to follow the Bali roadmap and expand the existing emissions trading market, promote an efficient and effective technology development and implementation program, launch an aggressive effort to protect the world's remaining forests, and embrace technology transfer. This will require innovative financing and investment - and, if properly implemented, will create major new opportunities for American industry to create the jobs of the future.

Featured Speaker:
Senator John Kerry (D - MA)

Introduction by:
Melody Barnes, Executive Vice President for Policy, Center for American Progress Action Fund

Location

Center for American Progress Action Fund
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Resources

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Biographies

Senator John Kerry is United States Senator from Massachusetts. For decades in public service, John Kerry has been an environmental leader, fighting on citizens' behalf to clean up toxic waste sites, to keep our air and water clean, and to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other pristine wilderness areas. He has just returned from Bali, where he represented the United States at the International Climate Negotiations. Kerry has been called the Senate's most outspoken environmentalist and the League of Conservation Voters has called him an "environmental champion." In 1970 he helped organize Massachusetts's first Earth Day, and then led the fight against acid rain in the northeast as Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. He helped defeat efforts to roll back the environmental accomplishments of a generation, whether in the form of regulatory reform or efforts to drill in national monuments and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Teaming up with John McCain, he stood up to the Bush Administration and led an uphill fight to improve fuel efficiency in automobiles. Having represented the United States at global climate change summits from Rio and Kyoto through the Hague, Kerry led the Senate effort to make environmental preservation a global priority through comprehensive treaties and pushing for the inclusion of important environmental protections in free trade agreements. In addition to supporting important environmental initiatives, John Kerry has turned a spotlight on the Bush Administration's rollbacks of our hard-won environmental gains and their outdated, old-economy notions that clean air, clean water and our national treasures must be sacrificed in the name of short-term profit.

Melody C. Barnes is the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, where she coordinates and helps to integrate all of the Action Fund's policy work from the policy departments, fellows, and the Action Fund's network of outside policy experts.

From December 1995 until March 2003, Barnes served as chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As Kennedy's chief counsel, she shaped civil rights, women's health and reproductive rights, commercial law, and religious liberties laws, as well as executive branch and judicial appointments. Barnes' experience also includes an appointment as Director of Legislative Affairs for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and serving as Assistant Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. During her tenure with the subcommittee, she worked closely with members of Congress and their staffs to pass the Voting Rights Improvement Act of 1992, which was signed into law.

Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling in New York City and is a member of both the New York State Bar Association and the District of Columbia Bar Association. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Constitution Project, EMILY's List, and the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan and her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated with honors in history.