Day 19: A Post-Election Missive

Too tired after watching Coakley’s unbelievable shambles of a campaign crash and burn to do much more than fire off a short one to the Boston Globe.

Massachusetts has officially elected a climate-change skeptic to the Senate. Among other things, this illuminates an unbelievable lack of scientific literacy in our schools, in our media, and in our politics. It is long past time for the White House to point out that denying something doesn’t change scientific facts. The Earth’s biosphere is in serious danger from decades of unregulated emissions of greenhouse gases; it’s not just humans who are moving rapidly toward a catastrophic evolutionary bottleneck, but millions of other life-forms as well. The Bush administration addressed climate change by denying its origin, its severity, and sometimes its existence — while passing cynically titled anti-environmental legislation with a bare majority in the Senate. The Obama administration seems to address climate change in the opposite way: by acknowledging its origin, severity and existence, while timidly refraining from using the Presidential bully pulpit to educate the public about the most severe existential threat ever faced by humans. Scott Brown may think atmospheric CO2 concentrations soaring to Mesozoic Era levels is a sign of economic growth, but his descendants, and ours, will judge us very harshly for our failure to act effectively while we still had the time.

Warren Senders

I phonebanked for Coakley, donated and did a bit of sign-holding at the polls. I think she would have been an excellent Senator. But…By Grabthar’s Hammer, that was the worst clusterf**k of a political campaign I’ve ever seen or heard. Martha made John McCain’s presidential run look like a finely polished gem.