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It strikes me that the anti-global warming brigade would make a more impressive stand if it started doing a bit more telecommuting:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on an overseas trip to embrace an audience and a topic for which President Bush has shown scant affection: “Old Europe” and global warming.

Pelosi, D-Calif., and seven other House members left Saturday for meetings with scientists and politicians in Greenland, Germany and Belgium on ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The trip comes shortly before a climate change summit next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.

Pelosi’s probably been traveling more than she should since taking over the Speakership. Wouldn’t a phone call do? Or maybe having her face televised on a big, big monitor?

Of course, Pelosi is from the Bay Area, and as I’ve known for years and the Zombie has brought to everyone’s attention, Bay Area activists aren’t known for their consistency. When the Zombie took pictures at Al Gore’s “the world is going up in flames” talk in Marin County, she included a gallery devoted to all the SUVs filling the parking lot for his speech. I’ve personally always loved seeing these gas hogs tooling down the road with “No War for Oil” and “Stop Global Warming” prominently displayed on their bumper stickers.

To give credit where credit is due, more and more Priuses are showing up on the road as well. They’re quiet — too quiet for some people — and they certainly use smaller amounts of fossil fuels. This is a good thing, if only to undercut profits for oil producing dictatorships. Sadly, they have their own environmental sins, and I’m willing to bet that none of the purchasers know about this, nor would they care to learn about it after having invested so heavily, both economically and emotionally, in these cars.

[Discuss This Topic With Bookworm]

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