Year 2, Month 10, Day 20: Thoughts On Not Wanting To Not Do Something

The New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal writes about the disappearance of the term “climate change” from our political discussion:

IN 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.

But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

I recycled a letter that got published by the Boston Globe this past April, filed off the serial numbers, and sent it in on October 16:

Environmentalists are entirely justified in their frustration at the Obama administration’s pusillanimity on the issues of energy and climate. Climate change’s factuality is now beyond dispute, and the positive economic ramifications of a transformed energy policy are likewise subject to wide agreement across the ideological spectrum. Why, then, does a president whose campaign pledged a transformation in our nation’s climate policy seem so reluctant to fulfill some of the promises that got him elected in the first place?

Simple answers are easy and convenient, but as H.L. Mencken pointed out, they’re wrong. It’s unlikely that Mr. Obama is deliberately betraying his core constituency on environmental issues; he is, after all, a politician of considerable skill. Rather, the administration’s paralysis on energy and climate policy must be considered diagnostically — they’re symptoms of chronic long-term exposure to toxic levels of petrochemicals and their financial byproducts. Our political system has been poisoned.

Warren Senders