Year 3, Month 11, Day 1: Make Me Wanna Holler…

The Christian Science Monitor wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why:

Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn’t come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don’t want to hear a difficult message.

In four years, climate change has gone from the elephant that blind men are trying to describe to the elephant in the room.

No one wants to talk about it. With a few exceptions, voters don’t ask. And presidential candidates don’t tell.

Now that the 2012 presidential debates are over, commentators have begun to take notice. Not once during the three presidential encounters or the single vice-presidential debate did the subject come up.

“National elections should be a time when our nation considers the great challenges and opportunities the next President will face,” opines the website ClimateSilence.org, a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed at pushing the issue into campaigns. “But the climate conversation of 2012 has been defined by a deafening silence.”

Sheesh. Sent October 25:

For a major news outlet to assert that “voters don’t want to hear a difficult message” as an explanation for the presidential candidates’ aversion to discussion of climate change is disingenuous. While nobody likes getting bad news, it is (or should be) the responsibility of professional journalists to help the general population understand difficult or complex subjects. This is crucial when the problem is exacerbated by delay, as in the case of the greenhouse effect and its consequences.

Over the past several decades, in fact, our print and broadcast media have shown extraordinary reluctance to cover environmental issues in a scientifically responsible way. Instead we’re offered a neutralized version of the truth, in which scientific findings are falsely equated with predictable denialist tropes. When reporters and analysts tell us that “the public doesn’t care about climate change,” they’re really saying that they don’t want to tackle the subject.

Warren Senders