I have serious doubts about Clinton's environmental "cred." I'll cite just two examples of why:

She was on the board of a notorious polluter, the Lafarge cement company, which burned during her tenure (and continues to burn) major quantities of coal and hazardous waste in their kilns.

On a more personal level, I was involved with a successful six-and-a-half-year fight against a proposal which, at the time, would have been the largest coal-fired cement plant in the country. Clinton was my Senator. I met with her face-to-face, thanks to someone to whom she owed a big favor, in Washington. She assured me personally that she was on our side against the polluter, and that she would help. She could have made a big difference to thousands of people fighting the good fight. But she never came through... However, after we won, she claimed to have been fighting with us all along.

This was sadly what I'd always heard about Hillary Clinton, but I didn't believe it until it happened to me personally.

See my Grist interview for more info on the fight referenced in #2.

--Sam Pratt

Does she favor a moratorium on new coal power plants?

They all talk so well (that is why they are up there as finalists for president).  But I am afraid none of the remaining candidates (except Mike Gravel, who I believe is not on the ballot here in NYS - I will find out in one hour) are serious enough about the environment.  In fact, Hillary Clinton here seems to focus only on global warming.  Maybe that is in order to avoid blank stares from the audience, but the real problems involve warming, and resources (water, soil) depleting, and other forms of pollution.  And 2050?  That sounds much too late.

Hillary referred to addressing climate change as the "equivalent of the space race".

I think that should be added.

It's not just Hillary, but also Grist and the League of Conservation Voters that have sudden amnesia about every single environmental issue that doesn't directly relate to global warming.  Toxins, loss f biodiversity, deforestation, protecting roadless areas, plummeting marine populations, solid waste (the floating mass of trash in the Pacific Ocean) etc.  When the enviro.'s stop talking about all of those, I guess they aren't problems anymore.  I guess we must have solved all those problems during the past seven years.

FRW, I am with you 100% i.e. the issues are bigger - and in a way more solvable - than just global warming and CO2 emissions.  Oil and energy depletion, pollution, water shortages, and more, these are all vital problems.  And they all originate due to a separation of people from our own life support systems, due to an attitude of humans vs. nature, the "conquering" of nature.  Summarizing from Chief Seattle: "The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth".  But forgetting that, we saw off the tree limb on which we are sitting.  The crash will not be pretty, and may be permanently crippling.  It is time to wake up.  The answer is to live differently, and to throw out unresponsive governments, and to make this a more humane world for all life.