Last Monday, coinciding with a new round of UN negotiations on climate change, Dr. Rachel Smolker entered the D.C. offices of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. Along with 20 other protesters, she decried the fund's positions on climate change.
Smolker, 50, works for Global Justice Ecology Project, a Hinesburg nonprofit that fights for social and environmental justice. Smolker's father, Robert, founded Environmental Defense in the 1960s. But she is disappointed with the nonprofit's stance on climate change.
Specifically, Smolker has a beef with ED's support of cap-and-trade carbon exchanges. "We and a growing movement of people around the globe oppose these market based solutions because they don't work," she told Seven Days last week.
On December 4, Fox News columnist Steven Milloy reflected on the D.C. protest in his weekly column, "Junk Science." In the installment, "Green-on-Green Violence," he wrote:
While this column’s position is that globalwarming alarmism is the ultimate in junk science and that the proposedsolutions to this non-problem amount to economic and social suicide,for those who believe in the need for global warming regulation, the [Global Justice Ecology Project] activists do indeed have a point — cap-and-trade is a charade.
Milloy's previous column addressed President-Elect Barack Obama's plan to create a new public works program.
For Vermont context on this issue, see our January, 2008, cover story, "Carbon Copy?"
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