Year 4, Month 2, Day 18: Hey Now Baby, Get Into My Big Black Car

The Palm Beach Post wonders if the President is gonna go there:

Climate change — a topic absent from last year’s presidential campaign — has slipped so far down the nation’s to-do list that stakeholders have taken to counting how often the president even utters the phrase.

So when President Barack Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural address Jan. 21, those observers cautiously took notice. Now they are waiting to see whether the president mentions climate change again in his State of the Union address Tuesday.

“If he were to talk about it regularly, then it would matter,” said Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who recently published articles on climate change policy during the president’s first term. “Public opinion researchers have found that public opinion decays really fast, so you have to keep at it.”

Read the comments on the article and get seriously depressed. Sheesh. February 9:

A storm of unprecedented size hammers the East coast of the USA, destroying towns and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage. A giant snowstorm drops two feet of snow on the Northeast, leaving half a million people without power. Drought cripples our agriculture; last year is confirmed as the hottest in recorded history — and yet there is still a question as to whether climate change deserves presidential recognition? How bizarre.

Think of it this way: if a terror attack destroyed thousands of homes, wrecked infrastructure, crippled huge sections of the power grid, and threatened the continued safety and productivity of our agriculture, politicians and media would be beating the war drums night and day. But when the same wreckage is a consequence of our addiction to oil, those voices are curiously silent.

There is still hope to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, but there is no time to lose, and none to waste. Conservative commentators who treat “global warming” as a laugh line are on the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.

Warren Senders