You may or may not like Mitt Romney. You may or may not like Barack Obama. But these past two weeks, despite all the scripted speeches and propaganda sloganeering of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, one of these two demonstrated political courage and the other did not.
The scientific case for human-induced global climate disruption is overwhelming. Well over 95% of active researching and publishing climate scientists agree on this fact and the causes. The public and policy makers are still struggling to figure out howe to incorporate the science into social and economic decision-making. That’s the only place where there is actual controversy. It takes political courage, in the current American climate (pun intended), to even mention climate disruption (also called popularly “global warming” or “climate change”). It takes even more political courage to speak at length about it.
The mention of climate disruption, or even climate science, was almost entirely missing from the Republican platform for 2012. As I noted in a previous post, the only mention of something related to climate disruption had to do with a criticism of Barack Obama and how often he says that word in relation to words related to terrorism. There was complete avoidance of the subject in the platform, and complete avoidance of the subject by Mitt Romney in his acceptance speech [1]. From a scientist’s perspective, that is total political cowardice. For an issue that so clearly presents challenged to the economy and social outcomes of the People of the United States, utter avoidance of the subject is tantamount to grabbing a second shovel to bury their heads even deeper in the sand. I prefer crazy anti-science statements setting up scientists as flammable straw figures easily burned to the ground over total silence on an issue so important to the United States and to the world.
Why did President Barack Obama demonstrate political courage? Because he put this smack in his convention speech [2]:
We’re offering a better path where we — a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal, where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks, where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy, where — where we develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet. If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone. (Cheers, applause.)
And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. (Cheers, applause.) They are a threat to our children’s future.
Despite this mention of such an important scientific issue with deep ties to our species continued success, it’s bittersweet. There’s been no more progress on implementing a national carbon trading/curtailing market that could then be applied as a model to other countries whose carbon emissions are as much, if not more of, a problem than those of the U.S (e.g. China). If the U.S. it to be a city on a hill, it must act like that and not like a spoiled and entitled child. President Obama had the political courage to acknowledge the seriousness of this issue, even if he was unable or unwilling to press this issue on a national level over the past four years.
You can view that as a promise broken. There’s no reason to view it otherwise. But I view the silence of the Republican party, and its nominee, on this matter as a promise never made. You can’t break a promise you don’t make, but failure to make the promise at all, when all evidence demands it, is the sign of a party that cannot be trusted to do what is best for an entire nation.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160357612/transcript-mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech
[2] http://www.npr.org/2012/09/06/160713941/transcript-president-obamas-convention-speech
