To the mattresses

Last week saw the start of a new American environmentalism on climate policy: the gloves seem to be coming off.

Our own Fred Krupp’s article in the Huffington Post on Tuesday revealed the new fighting spirit:

[W]e have well-financed enemies in this fight, and it is time to sharpen the nation’s focus on the businesses that obstruct vital progress.

Our view is that the public and the investor community need to have far greater awareness of the companies engaged in indiscriminate obstructionism. We will look for ways to hold them accountable through every reasonable lever at our disposal. We will learn to be as tough with them as they have been with us.

Looks like Al Gore took note. His group Repower America launched KochIndustriesFacts.com, which flags Twitter and Facebook-ready snippets on the money involved, some of the smoke and mirror tactics used (speak “front groups”), and the dirty environmental trail left by Koch Industries.

With well-funded opponents like that it is not hard to see how cap and trade got swallowed up in D.C., no matter how strong the economic arguments in favor of a well-designed carbon market were. But beware: climate change isn’t going away.

To the mattresses it is.