Curtis  Braindead  Brainard: Candidates clam up on climate

Reporters call out Obama and Romney’s silence

Nary a word has been spoken about climate change on the presidential campaign trail, and it’s a silence that some journalists find deafening.

In the last few weeks, a variety of reporters have called out the candidates for utterly ignoring the issue. The Associated Press’s Steven R. Hurst, for instance, reminded readers that just four months ago, Barack Obama told Rolling Stone that he suspected climate change would become a major point of debate.

“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,” Obama said. But that promise has come to naught, Hurst reported. Instead, Obama is fighting Republican challenger Mitt Romney “over the struggling American economy and stubbornly high unemployment.”

The New York Times’s Felicity Barringer observed that the candidates are willing to talk about energy policy (as they did last week), largely because it is intimately related to the jobs debate. But “climate change has been the issue that national politicians seem to avoid at all costs,” Barringer wrote. That’s a problem, National Journal’s Amy Harder argued, since “the next president will have to address [global warming], no matter who wins in November.”

Apart from the heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that have “thrust climate change back into the spotlight,” Harder wrote, “the State and Transportation departments must address a European Union cap-and-trade law aimed at forcing airlines to pay fees for greenhouse gases emitted by all flights to and from Europe. Yet neither candidate is addressing these unavoidable realities—at least not yet.”

CJR

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2 Responses to Curtis  Braindead  Brainard: Candidates clam up on climate

  1. On both sides of the great Boot On Your Neck Party (DemaGOP and Republicrat), there’s a deep statist desire to leverage the great “man-made climate change” hobgoblin as a way to foist increased taxation and regulation on the sheeple, but neither the ACORN thugs manipulating Kenyan Keynesian nor “establishment” goons twisting the knobs on the Etch-A-Sketch want to bring the subject to public attention during this election cycle.

    Since Climategate 1.0, it’s simply too obvious to entirely too many people that anthropogenic global warming is a concerted – i.e., “cooked-up” – fraud, and because there’s no real contrast between the positions taken by the Romnhoid and our Illegal-Alien-in-Chief on this preposterous bogosity, there’s no advantage for either of ‘em, and a helluva lot of potential liability.

    So mum’s the word, right?

  2. “Climate Change” is a stupid phrase. Vacuous, in fact. The silence on Obama’s part is for expediency, whilst for Romney it’s knowing the silliness of it all.

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