Bueller?

(Click on image to enlarge and then kindly bring your backside back.)

Talk about synchronicity! Many of us have been complaining about the issue which is being ignored by the presidential candidates, and, WHAM!, an absolutely horrific superstorm hits the East Coast.  Suddenly all sorts of people are noticing the silence.  This gives those of us, including David Horsey, who have been yammering about the silence on climate change some solace, but only insofar as it makes it clear that our tin foil bonnets are not too tight.

While the rest of the world long ago moved beyond asking if climate change is real to accepting it as a fact, the United States has stalled in a ridiculous debate. Romney leads a party in which a majority believes that climate change is a hoax and the rest -- including Romney -- avoid talking about the issue, lest they be seen as anti-capitalist, bug-loving granola eaters. Obama could speak to the issue if he wished, but he avoids it too, perhaps not wanting to give the right-wingers another reason to accuse him of plotting against America.

The issue cannot be skirted forever, though. Members of Congress can rant on about hoaxes and nefarious plots to destroy industry by curtailing CO2 emissions, but one day not too distant, even the science deniers will be unable to deny that a big bill is coming due. Rising sea levels, extended drought, raging wildfires and more frequent and more violent storms will have a huge economic cost. ...

It is way past time for the federal government to develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with all of this. And it is truly unconscionable that our presidential candidates have ignored the issue, other than to spout a few gaseous sound bites about clean energy and green jobs.

To twist an old passage from the Bible, they that sow only hot air shall reap the whirlwind.   [Emphasis added]

We are way past the point of "carbon trades" and "independence from foreign oil."  We are at the point (and perhaps past the point) of recognizing that the use of any carbon based energy is compounding the problem.  We need a moon-shot initiative that makes it clear to each and every citizen that we need to use less energy, far less, and that energy has to come from clean and renewable sources.  And then we have to fund it.

If we don't, Sandy will go from "Frankenstorm" to the norm, and more than the East Coast will be affected.  We don't need politicians, we need people who take the job of representing the entire nation seriously.  Without leadership at the top and the congressional level we are in for the kind of trouble we, and the entire planet, may not recover from.

And that will happen quickly, not down the road fifty years from now.