If you’re wondering what Obama’s Global Energy Forum is, it’s not your fault - the American press hasn’t covered it at all. That’s a shame. His platform statement on energy states:

Obama will build on our domestic commitments by creating a negotiating process that involves a smaller number of countries than the nearly 200 countries in the current Kyoto system. Obama will create a Global Energy Forum - based on the G8+5, which included all G-8 members plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa - of the world’s largest emitters to focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues…

This Global Energy Forum will complement - and ultimately merge with - the much larger negotiation process underway at the UN to develop a post-Kyoto framework.

The statement also says that the forum will allow the U.S. to “exert maximum pressure on China and India to do their part and make real commitments of their own.” This is monumentally important. Yet last week, instead of getting Obama to elaborate on the forum in the context of the G-8 meeting, the press focused on his advertisement. It’s disgraceful.

John McCain is an equally ripe target for questioning on this subject. His Web site and energy plan don’t have anything as detailed as Obama’s forum, but his point of view needs no less explication. When McCain made his let’s-take-the-lead-on-climate-change speech in Portland, Oregon in May, he criticized the Bush administration’s intransigence, but “prodded” China and India to do their part in reducing carbon output. He added, however, that if efforts to secure an international agreement that includes those two countries don’t succeed, the U.S. still has “an obligation to act.” As National Public Radio reported at the time:

A prepared text of McCain’s speech supplied to reporters suggested that western countries might use trade sanctions to push China and India into cutting their carbon output. But in delivering the speech, McCain substituted softer language, saying diplomacy and technical support should be enough to move the two countries.

Clearly, both Obama and McCain have a lot to explain about their views of the U.S.’s role in leading, or at least participating in, global climate negotiations. The press should force them to do that and move beyond sound bites taken from campaign advertisements and stump speeches. Unfortunately, journalists missed a golden opportunity to do that during the G-8 meeting last week. But such questions still need answers, and there will be other chances to dig into candidates’ opinions about environmental policy.

Over the weekend, Felicity Barringer had an excellent article in The New York Times about two critical decisions — a court verdict striking down a “cornerstone” of the air-pollution control and the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act — that “shut the door” on Bush’s clean air policy. “Taken together,” she writes, “the developments make it clear that any significant new effort to fight air pollution will fall to the next president.” Um, yeah, so let’s ask the candidates about that. The Journal got brief, EPA-related quotes from both them — Obama is disappointed in the agency and McCain isn’t — but that’s not enough. Reporters must use current events to leverage more information about what the candidates will do in office.

• 1
• 2