Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumCLIMATE CHANGE, THE DEBATE’S GREAT UNMENTIONABLE
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/climate-change-the-debates-great-unmentionable.htmlEarly on in Tuesday nights debate, the candidates faced off about gasoline prices. In the subsequent coverage, that discussion was very nearly ignored in favor of Mitt Romneys claim to have hired binders full of women as the governor of Massachusetts and the question of what, exactly, the President said about Benghazi in the Rose Garden. But the exchange deserves attention because it demonstrates why America has never hadand, at the rate things are going, never will havean even remotely sane energy policy.
The gasoline question was posed by a Long Islander named Philip Tricolla, who wanted to know whether the President saw it as the job of the Department of Energy to lower prices at the pump. This is a question that, in one form or another, seems to be asked every four years, and every four years the candidates all know, or should know, what the answer is. Oil is a globally traded commodity whose price is set on a global market; no matter what the Energy Secretary does or doesnt do, its not going to make much difference. The candidates also know that this is not what voters want to hear, and so they say something else.
President Barack Obama began by touting recent increases in domestic-energy production. He said that oil production is up in the U.S., which is true. The implication was that this was somehow going to translate into lower consumer costs, which is false. A recent analysis by the Associated Press showed that there is no statistical correlation between how much oil comes out of U.S. wells and the price at the pump. Mitt Romney countered by arguing that oil production is down on federal lands, which is hokum, and went on to claim that if he were President, so much oil would come gushing from those lands that energy prices would plummet and manufacturing jobs would return to America and people would all soon be travelling by jetpack. (O.K., the jetpack part I made up.)
Obama deserves credit for at least mentioning the need to control energy demandrather than just supplysomething that Romney never even alluded to. The President should also be commended for stressing the need to develop alternativewhich is to say carbon-freeenergy sources, which he called key to the jobs of the future. But aside from the potential for job creation, the President could never quite bring himself to discuss why it might not be a good idea to burn every gallonor cubic footof fossil fuels we could conceivably bring to the earths surface. In the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, climate change has become to the Obama Administration the Great Unmentionable, or, as the blogger Joe Romm has put it, The-Threat-That-Must-Not-Be Named.
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phantom power
(25,966 posts)"What is your plan for an America where the grain belt resides in Canada?"
xchrom
(108,903 posts)CRH
(1,553 posts)when Candi Crowley was being congratulated on her performance, with hand wringing angst said there wasn't enough time for all the questions and subjects she had selected, 'like climate change'. So someone had submitted a question of the taboo topic, but it was shuffled to the bottom where it would never be asked.
When I heard it I started laughing. Through two conventions and now two debates, the MSM has left any democratic comments on climate change, (few), totally unreported. Nothing even mentioned in the aftermath. What to me is incredible, is the MSM is always looking for a distinction between the candidates and the two parties, and there is no subject with greater distinction that anthropogenic global warming and climate change. Abortion and women's rights, are the only other topics that create equal distinction of policy and belief. Yet, climate change is totally ignored, and worse, avoided.
Add insult to injury, the democratic party, slides statements of climate change in between comments of 'clean coal' and nat. gas as new clean energy policy, and makes no effort on the campaign trail or the conventions or debates to bring it forward as a valid issue. The party is content to give climate change nothing more than scanty lip service and keep it hidden as a silent plank.
With no dialog, the public it is certain, will remain ignorant to the greatest threat to their future.
Viking12
(6,012 posts)Nihil
(13,508 posts)Neither wing of the American political circus wants the general public to awaken
to the sheer bowel-loosening scale of the gambles that they're indulging in for
their own personal gain.
No doubt if some people had their way, even mentioning that there is a problem
would be cause to put the speaker not just onto the "No Fly" list but straight
across into Guantanamo for "activities against the state".