Year 3, Month 8, Day 20: How Do You Know That You Know What You Know When You Don’t Know What You Know At All?

The Winnipeg Star notes that American presidential politics doesn’t seem to care, really:

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Barack Obama promised to tackle climate change when he ran for the White House four years ago, but as he battles for a second term, he says little about the issue, even as the United States suffers through a drought of historic proportions, wild storms, and punishing heat that topples temperature records almost daily.

As late as April, he told Rolling Stone magazine climate change would be a central campaign issue.

“I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” he said.

Instead, Obama is fighting Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a tight race over the struggling American economy and stubbornly high unemployment. Gallup polling repeatedly shows the economy is the chief concern among American voters, at 65 per cent, while environmental and pollution issues were mentioned by less than one per cent of those polled.

Even without a big push on climate change, Obama has the support of environmentalists. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said Obama “has done a substantial amount in his three years to fight the climate crisis.” Romney, he said, “is taking his lead from fossil-fuel companies and does not even acknowledge there is a climate problem.”

Romney has been accused of changing positions on the issue to curry favour with the most conservative Republicans, many of whom deny climate change exists.

La la la la la la. Sent August 9:

This year’s extreme weather may have forced climate change into the public eye, but we still hear that concerns about the economy must necessarily supersede environmental worries. This is a profoundly misleading notion.

We have been able to ignore the crisis for so long because we have not yet recognized that the health of the economy and that of the planet are inextricably linked. The ecological “economy” of planet Earth has been functioning well for many orders of magnitude longer than industrialized humanity’s fiscal economy. To elevate the importance of the latter over the former is to make a profound miscalculation with potentially disastrous consequences.

Ultimately, our prosperity depends on a healthy and consistent climate; if you subtract potable water, clean air, regular weather and flourishing biodiversity from the equation, the result is always going to be catastrophe — regardless of how well the GDP is doing that quarter.

Warren Senders

Published.