Periscope: World’s First Green Leader

Commentators worldwide called Australia's vote last week the world's first "climate change election." After five years of drought, Australians flocked to the Labor Party's Kevin Rudd, who'd campaigned on a green platform. No sooner than taking office did he reaffirm his promise to sign the Kyoto Protocol and stake out a lead role at this week's Bali Climate Summit. To make the message extra clear, Rudd is creating a new Ministry of Climate Change—ending the skepticism that prevailed under his predecessor, John Howard.

All this shows it's now official: the environment has been big business worldwide for years, with giants like GE and WalMart firmly seated on the green bandwagon; now it is key to mass-market politics too. In America "there has been a sea change in public opinion," says Anthony Leiserovitz, an expert on the politics of environmentalism at Yale. John Edwards has promised to end America's oil addiction and to create a million new "green-collar" jobs in enviro-friendly industries. Hillary Clinton has proposed spending a billion dollars to retrofit energy-wasting homes. And even some conservatives are getting in on the game. German chancellor Angela Merkel went on a highly publicized glacier tour in Greenland this summer before announcing she'd make climate change the priority for the rest of her term.

Rudd's election ratifies a shift to a new kind of climate-change-driven green politics that has little to do with the tree-hugging environmentalism of old. While he favors cutting emissions and switching to renewable energy, Rudd has also promised to veto restrictions on logging in Australia's remaining old-growth forests, out of fear of endangering jobs. This kind of balance provides an attractive model. In Canada last week, opposition leader Jack Layton of the New Democrats announced that he'll campaign on a platform modeled on Rudd's.

Ironically, the biggest losers are the real Green Parties, who are seeing their thunder stolen by mainstream pols. In Australia, the Greens won no seats last week. Germany's Greens have been kicked out of the government, and with the two main parties now competing over who is greenest, the Greens have turned to defending the welfare state instead. Of course, whether the new policies are well thought out or just geared to appeal to voters and interest groups (think America's corn ethanol producers) is an entirely different question. What has become clear is that going green is now a viable path to real power.

—Stefan Theil and Patrick Falby

'P.M. Bean'
Safe as houses: This was Gordon Brown's defining strength, as a chancellor who presided over rock-steady prosperity. But in September the bad news began: a run on an ailing British bank, the disappearance of financial data on 25 million Britons and, last week, charges of unlawful donations from a property developer to Brown's Labour Party. Then, as the defensive P.M. faced Parliament, Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable noted this "remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean—creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos." Brown seems likely to survive in office, but the core of his reputation—financial competence—is increasingly under threat. Britain's estimated GDP growth rate is slowing to about 2 percent. Home prices in October experienced their steepest decline since 1995. Suddenly houses don't look quite as safe.