It’s a question that could have been asked in any one of the three debates because it has implications on domestic policy, on the economy and on international affairs. It’s estimated it will take a few billions out of our economy every year, and yet no one saw fit to ask about climate change policy at any of the debates.
Neither Romney nor Obama addressed it directly, though Obama made several references to alternative energy research in terms of job creation.
Candy Crowley did have someone who wanted to ask about it in the town hall debate, but she didn’t deem it an economic priority, so it didn’t get asked.
You can’t get away from the fact that climate change should be a critical issue: a lot of foreign policy considerations are hooked into it, not the least of which is trying to get any agreement at all on controlling greenhouse-gas emissions.
Boiling up in the melting Arctic waters are international contentions over oil exploration. Even the muscle-heads at the Pentagon consider climate change as an issue that needs to be included in their future projections on security. Among their considerations are increased instability from problems like prolonged heat-waves, and long-term drought. Water shortages and food distribution problems will surely feed such unrest.
Severe weather has been increasingly causing disasters here at home, too. Hence the extra billions of dollars in costs mentioned above for flood, tornado, and hurricane disaster relief. Also for wild-fires and drought mitigation.
And just think about what we’ll be facing with raising ocean levels. Something like 30 military bases will be at risk as levels rise, and of course troops are often used to assist in natural disasters. Not just from more hurricanes and tornadoes, but also from increasing wildfires due to changes in rainfall.
It’s a pretty dismaying picture to think about for me and for many of us here. So why didn’t policy on climate change get asked??? The media is one likely culprit. They are busy feeding the anti-science meme of the tea-partiers, and are apparently in denial themselves, for the most part. I’d say we have “Climategate” on our hands.
We haven’t even gotten to a public acknowledgment that climate change is happening and the best we can do at this point is to try to mitigate the effects.
I know other important issues did need to be debated, but man, we need to get climate change on the table, and push for essential mitigation policies to insure our future.