Pirate's Cove

They really can’t help themselves. Nor have they become carbon neutral

(Huffington Post) Of the roughly 50,000 words spoken in this month’s three presidential debates, none were “climate change,” “global warming” or “greenhouse gas.”

HuffPo is also upset that other issues have been blown off

The 2012 presidential campaign, not just the debates, has focused heavily from the start on jobs, pushing other once high-profile issues to the sidelines. It dismays activists who have spent decades promoting environmental issues, gay rights, gun control and other topics, sometimes managing to lift them to the top tiers of national attention and debate.

Bummer. Sir David Attenborough is also bummed

Asked what was needed to wake people up, the veteran broadcaster famous for series such as Life and Planet Earth said: “Disaster. It’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? Even disaster doesn’t do it. There have been disasters in North America, with hurricanes and floods, yet still people deny and say ‘oh, it has nothing to do with climate change.’ It visibly has got [something] to do with climate change.”

But some US politicians found it easier to deny the science on climate change than take action, he said, because the consequence of recognising the science on man-made climate change “means a huge section from the national budget will be spent in order to deal with it, plenty of politicians will be happy to say ‘don’t worry about that, we’re not going to increase your taxes.'”

Well, yeah, especially when the economy sucks. And here’s excitable Eugene Robinson

Not a word has been said in the presidential debates about what may be the most urgent and consequential issue in the world: climate change.

Is this the same climate that has been stagnant for the last 16 years? And the Lake Wylie Pilot noticed the “climate silence”, and posits

And the election may prove a turning point, say environmentally minded political strategists. It can be a winning issue on the campaign trail, said Betsy Taylor, a political strategist who works with environmentalists. She teaches candidates and advocates to talk about putting American ingenuity to use to address global warming, rather than focusing on science. They also need to focus on the impacts of extreme weather, she said. In that context, people see climate change as their problem, not a faraway global one.

If it’s such a winning issue, why do most politicians stay away from it? Probably because most voters understand that the “solutions” involve massive taxation, increases in cost of living, and loss of freedom. And they can all see what happened in Queensland, Australia, where the party that pushed and passed “climate change” legislation was destroyed in their last election, to the point that the Labor Party is no longer an officially recognized party.