IN 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.Some people think it's worse than that:
But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.
“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.It is clear to me that because capitalism cannot deal with global warming, it simply won't. Are we going to let them destroy our habitat? I know of no other creature that does that deliberately.
It is not as the author argues: a Democratic versus Republican issue.
“We are seeing doubts in the U.S. largely because the issue has become a partisan one, with Democrats” — 75 percent of whom say they believe there is strong evidence of climate change — “seeing one thing and Republicans another.”The responses in the Pew pool were from people who vote in elections as Democrats or Republicans. There is no other choice. The leadership of these parties are controlled by the same class of people who have the same interests. The fact that Democratic party leaders sometimes mouth empty phrases reflecting environmental concerns never translates into action.
Also, it is not the US versus the-rest-of-the-world issue. Certainly some other countries have done more than the US to curb carbon emissions, but most are failing to meet commitments and/or using carbon trading to cheat. Read the following:
Kyoto's Carbon Offsetting Moves from Tragedy to Farce
A Grim Outlook for Emissions As Climate Talks Limp Forward
