Courtesy Getty Images via PBS
The silence in these elections around climate change is rather stunning–until you consider the context. For the context (i.e., voters worried about jobs and the economy), check out the pre-election edition of Frontline by John Hockenberry that aired on PBS October 23 about the current state of the climate-change conversation in Washington. It tracks the thinning of the climate debate since the 2008 election, when Barack Obama and John McCain “agreed that climate change was a critical issue demanding urgent attention.” Part of the program describes the work of a reporter, Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environment for National Journal. Davenport, at one point, attempted to survey Republicans in Congress with three simple questions on climate change (Republicans, she says, because almost no Democrats will flat-out deny its existence). “Normally lawmakers love to answer questions,” she says, but when she tried to ask members for their views in person, “they literally ran into elevators.” (An online interview with Davenport by Azmat Khan is here. Links to Davenport’s work can be found here.) Legislators who say they believe in climate change risk being crushed by candidates backed by skeptics’ money. Ask former Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.), a Republican climate-change believer, whom Arthur Allen interviewed for LAM in November 2011–he appears in the Frontline report. Also on the program: A rundown of the efforts this year by the North Carolina legislature to chill debate about climate change. One geologist near the center of that drama, Stanley Riggs, of East Carolina University, points to the surf and says, “That ocean will dictate what happens. The ocean is gonna win.”
I had watched the Frontline program and was struck by Stanley Riggs comments. As the scenes of Super storm Sandy unfolded I told my children what he had said. Yes, the ocean dictated what happened. The ocean won. I hope this lesson will be remembered as people deal with the devastation.