Following on Red Green and Blue’s lead last week, today’s New York Times editorial notes that the White House and their Congressional allies on cap-and-trade have all but acknowledged that the climate change argument will not be enough - on its own strength - to win support for comprehensive energy and environment legislation in 2009. So, while climate-based arguments by the movement’s superstars - like Al Gore - are gaining wider public acceptance and near-unanimous adoption in the intelligentsia, the case is still not enough to win political support when the Senate takes the issue up in the fall.

Last week brought us climate as a security threat and White House officials are continuing to float trial balloons throughout August as they grope for a communications strategy. This week’s angle: green jobs. Steven Chu has been making the green jobs pitch a strong part of his summer road show. He continued to beat the drum as part of a round table discussion with Gore and others at Senator Harry Reid’s National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 last week in Las Vegas. Taking the measure of the two approaches, the Boston Globe editorial page joined today’s NYT in bringing the White House’s previously tacit acknowledgment of the need for a new course out into the open.

The Globe editors noted that “at a time when the public is more focused on the future of its paycheck than the future of civilization, Chu’s case for the climate change bill will win it more support [than Gore's].” The political irony is rich: by abandoning the science-based argument because it does not enjoy popular acceptance, it becomes less likely that it will gain popular acceptance down the road and the feedback loop that began with Jimmy Carter continues into the future. When the approach is to get as much passed as possible, by whatever means necessary, with near-complete abandonment of the initially-stated purpose, the public can’t help but smell a rat, and it undermines progress on the whole climate issue.

Like security, this specific Trojan Horse strategy has it own unique risks. Even if jobs are a more persuasive pitch to those constituencies that aren’t composed of a lot of “true believers” on climate change, there is a “fuzzy math” political feel to it that meets with its own skepticism. Ohioans, Michiganders, West Virginians, Texans and other voters who are dependent on heavy-polluting industries (i.e., mining, automobiles, refining, or agriculture) realize instinctively that their industries are likely to suffer under a climate change bill. That may cost jobs — which are already too scarce.

Senators who value their careers have good reason for reluctance in pressing the argument that while constituents may lose their jobs, there are better green jobs down the road for them. Today’s labor unions are more powerful, persuasive and invested than the theoretical ones of the future. Moreover, the green worker is of a different stripe than the workers who are likely to be displaced. In other words, any job creation that is likely to happen will be for well-educated workers, and the overall employment impact is likely to be a geographic resettling of employment on the coasts.

Workers in the climate battle’s swing states are already watching low-skill, low-wage jobs disappear as China offers a more cost-competitive workforce. The competition angle - with China as the black hat - is another part of Chu’s green jobs pitch. Chu told the conference that while “the US is still ahead of China…[i]f we move in this direction, we can be the leader and seize the opportunity.’’ The greener-as-more-competitive argument finds itself a far less nefarious home in this context than in the border adjustments and other tariff-based measures that are being discussed as ways to preserve American competitiveness and prevent carbon leakage.

It will take some time to see if the Obama team can hit on a climate change story that plays. They have tried science. They have tried security. Now, they are trying jobs. Life is not full of really good fourth options.

Flickr photo courtesy of the Clean Energy Summit

Reprinted with permission from Red Green and Blue