Word: polarizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...created. Those jobs--call them green collar--were exactly what unemployed residents of cities like Oakland needed. Environmental activists and inner-city minorities--two groups often segregated by race and class--had a common interest, and it could help extend the coalition against climate change beyond hard-core greenies. "Polar bears, Priuses and Ph.D.s aren't going to do it alone," says Jones, 39. "Everything our friends in the eco-élite do will vanish unless we find a way to expand green jobs to the rest of the economy...
...skeptical. The country has been hit hard by a brutal, multi-year drought that has devastated agriculture and put its biggest cities under water restrictions. Australians have begun to connect water fears to global warming, a bad sign for Howard, whose residence has been picketed by protesters dressed as polar bears. A recent poll of voters in several closely contested seats found that 73% said climate change would have a "strong influence" on the way they vote. "The water shortages have really rocketed climate change to a significant issue in people's minds," says John Connor, chief executive of Australia...
...Sorry, but those special glasses are mandatory. Back in the ?50s, when Hollywood made a couple dozen 3-D movies, skeptics said that kids would never go for the cellophane and cardboard polarized glasses (one eye with a red filter, one with a green), because they knew that bullies laid the "four eyes" taunt on the visually impaired. Glasses over your glasses would make you "six eyes." The 3-D fad died out in a few years, but it took ages for the technology to improve. As recently as 2005, those same cheesy specs were handed out at screenings...
...changes, it's less clear that climate change will truly emerge as a defining issue in either the primaries or the general election next November. The flash points thus far have been the war in Iraq, terrorism, health care, the sputtering economy and social issues like abortion - not melting polar ice caps. And there's good reason for that. A recent poll by the Kaiser Foundation asked Americans what two issues they most wanted the presidential candidates to talk about. Among Democrats, Republicans and Independents, climate change or the environment failed to crack the top seven choices. (For the record...
Schwarzenegger has discovered this in California. When he talks about global warming, it's not about dying polar bears. Instead it's about job creation, about responding positively to the climate challenge, about turning California into a center of green innovation. That rhetoric has helped give Schwarzenegger's climate policies broad bipartisan support - and if a Presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, is smart enough to sound like him, 2008 could still be the climate election...