While climate change is certainly still alive and well in our nation's capital (Congress is full of busy bees), I do stand by my assertion that it has been superseded in the campaigns by more pressing, Joe Six-Pack issues.
Climate change certainly did not receive as much attention in the debate last night as in the Vice-Presidential debate. Per CSPAN's transcript crawler, it was mentioned only once by both Sens. McCain and Obama. You can imagine my chagrin, then, when Tom Brokaw asked the candidates to rank-order three pressing issues facing the next president (energy, healthcare and entitlement) -- see clip below.
Courtesy of CSPAN, click to play
To add credence to claims of issue prioritization (at least in the rhetorical realm), CSPAN came up with a nice graphical representation of most commonly uttered words in the debate:
Courtesy of CSPAN, click to enlarge
Sen. Obama said "energy" almost as many times as Sen. McCain said "[my] friends", told Tom Brokaw that energy was the #1 priority (Sen. McCain said all three were equally important and can be solved at the same time), so I guess this means we're back in the game --- in as much as the candidates say things to make us happy.
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Robert J. Kaminski
M.S., Public Policy and Management - 2009
Managing Editor, Heinz School Review
2 comments:
I believe energy and climate change are very important issues. Energy is in the political arena because it is necessary for every day life. Climate Change is currently in the domain of the scientific community, and there is the best place for it, until such time that proof can be provided. Today's energy issues have been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution, but climate change only a few dozen years. It is still too early to politicize global warming. Politicians are not the experts, and although they ought to be informed, I believe we should leave it to the scientists, for the time being. My question is this: are you prepared to push expensive technologies like sequestration, rather than proven technologies like nuclear, which emits little CO2?
Doug Bauman EE 80
Tom Brokaw asked a question about the candidate's approach to energy independence. He didn't let Barack Obama answered so I posted some information on his position over at "Green is Good".
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