It’s been a hard year to be an environmentalist, but there are definitely still some things to be thankful for in 2008, especially in the last half of the year.
1. Polar Bears listed as an Endangered Species

I know, I know - animals becoming endangered isn’t usually a good thing, but in this case, the polar bears were already in trouble and the government was just refusing to acknowledge. It took a multi-year lawsuit by Greenpeace to force the federal government’s hand and the polar bear was finally listed for protection.
2. High Gas Prices

Another thing that seems counterintuitive at first glance, rising gas prices are going to be great for the environment. While the crisis this fall hit everyone in the pocket, I hope that, long-term, this will be seen as a turning point for the energy industry. As long as gas prices were creeping slowly upwards, year after year, people were going to accept the change with a grumble instead of demanding change. The prices skyrocketing well over $4 dollars a gallon this year shocked the world, and helped elect Barack Obama, a candidate who has committed to an alternative energy revolution in America. If it happens, this will be a fantastic win for air-quality and pollution, and a major step towards combating global warming.
3. The Announcement & Rejection of Offshore Drilling

John McCain and George Bush made a tag-team attempt at repealing the American ban on offshore drilling this summer in a bid to capitalize on gas prices to help John McCain win the Presidential election. Immediately, cash-strapped Americans, oil companies, and politicians in coastal states who were envious of tax revenues in oil-rich states, jumped on the issue, practically salivating at the pools of money they imagined.
Fortunately, over time this came to be seen as the shameless political ploy that it was, and the association with George W. Bush only hurt McCain in the long run. Following Obama’s promise of $150 billion dollars to jump-start the alternative energy industry, the plan seems to have fallen on its face.
We’re all lucky it came up with it did, and was dragged down by McCain and Bush’s disastrous fall.
4. The Rise of the Electric Car

Even before gas went completely out of control, people were starting to think proactively about getting more alternative-energy cars on the road. The Tesla Roadster debuted this spring and blew conventional prejudices about electric cars out of the water, and it seemed like everyone began thinking about luxury electric in a new way. Throw in the gas crisis, and major automakers around the world began to throw their weight behind new kinds of cars as SUV and truck sales ground to a halt. This led to the announcement of the Chevy Volt, the first plug-in hybrid, and a rush of electric auto development. Australia and the city of San Francisco both announced plans to build comprehensive recharging networks, and the day of the internal-combustion engine seems to be coming to a close.
5. The Economic Crisis

This one might be controversial, but hear me out: as long as the old ways were working, at least well enough for some people to get rich, nothing was really going to change. GM thought about an electric car before: they gave up. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House 30 years ago: Reagan tore them down. We had a gas crisis in the 1970s: nothing really changed.
While this recession is going to be hard, we also don’t have much left to lose. That’s going to make it easier to change. It undermines industry’s favorite excuse for staying the same, and puts Obama’s government in the position to say “Your way has failed” and force the country to make a change.
It’s hard to imagine relying the same way on oil from the Middle East. It’s hard to imagine denying global warming any longer. It’s hard to imagine us going back to the same old way, now that we’ve seen just how bad it can get.
I’m thankful that we seem to be making these steps, even if it took a disastrous year to get there.
Super special bonus: NO MORE BUSH!

The Daily Green recently published list of the worst environmental Presidents in American history. Guess which guy was number one? There’s no way that things won’t get better next year. Bush loved oil companies, was willingly courted and corrupted by big-business, didn’t believe in global warming for most of his presidency, denied its human causes once he did, and was an outright enemy of environmental protections and the Endangered Species Act. Kicking him and his party out of office was easily the biggest step that we could have taken this year, and the door is open for great changes in 2009.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Hope you’re all enjoying your holiday.
gas prices by glenn.batuyong, oil rig by PhillipC, Tesla roadster by Mike Weston, Graph by iburiedpaul, Bush by ImageEditor