Environmentalists plan to redirect strategies

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005874.html

Environmentalists plan to redirect strategies

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

As 2010 comes to a close, U.S. environmentalists are engaged in their most profound bout of soul-searching in more than a decade. Their top policy priority - imposing a nationwide cap on carbon emissions - has foundered in the face of competing concerns about jobs. Many of their political allies on both the state and federal level have been ousted. And the Obama administration has just signaled it could retreat on a couple of key air-quality rules.

Hence a shift of focus away from the toxic partisanship of Washington back to the grass roots and the shared values that gave the movement its initial momentum more than 40 years ago.

"Certainly I think we have figured out we need to find a way to really listen harder and connect with people all over America, especially in rural America," said Fred Krupp, president of the http://voices.washingtonpost.com/post-carbon/2010/11/gloom_and_doom_on_climate_can.html">Environmental Defense Fund. "I don't think we've done a particularly good job of that."

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"The tragedy is that they spent the last 10 years on this and not anything else," said http://www.catf.us/">Clean Air Task Force Executive Director Armond Cohen, whose group has pursued an array of alternative strategies aimed at curbing climate change and air pollution.

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