In the Saturday edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a former editorial writer for the paper, James Lenfestey, has an opinion piece posing six questions that he thinks journalists should be asking candidates about climate change.
Of course, he only means candidates that are Republicans seeking the Presidential nomination. He writes,
"Whatever you think of the performance of the Republican candidates in their first three debates, one failure is clear: that of the journalists posing the questions. How can any journalist serious about the issues facing national candidates fail to ask at least one question about climate change?"
As he is the former journalist, I shouldn't have to be the one to answer Mr. Lenfestey's rhetorical question. Journalists don't ask candidates about climate change because the media, at some level, still responds to market forces. And the market is telling the media that the public doesn't care.
Last October, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing a pronounced drop over the years in the public's belief about climate change and the seriousness of the threat. In 2006, more than half the population believed that climate change was a serious, human-caused problem and one that required immediate government action. By 2010, those figures had dropped to less than half the population.
Pew Research also conducts a separate poll, which asks the public to rank the importance of a number of issues as a "top priority." In January 2011, the economy ranked number one, with jobs a close second. Climate change limped in at the 21st spot, ahead of only obesity as an issue. Presidential debates offer only a limited amount of time for questions: journalists are simply not going to get to the 21st ranked issue on the public's mind.
Earlier in the week, on the MinnPost website, TV's Don Shelby writes what he believes is a more successful column, pinning down a local Tea Party representative on global warming facts. Shelby poses a question on climate change science, records the hapless victim's answer, and then tells his sophisticated and educated readers what they already knew, the correct answer that the Tea Party guy didn't get.
I'm sure Shelby, as does Lenfestey, thinks this "gotcha" journalistic technique will turn the tide on the whole climate change debate: if we can just show what rubes these Tea Party/Republican/Conservatives are on the science then the rest of the public that doesn't believe will fall into line and cap and trade will be passed by Thanksgiving.
Instead, Shelby and Lenfestey should take some advice from either Walter Russell Mead or the folks at the Breakthrough Institute. As Mead wrote on his blog earlier this summer, his problem lies with the policy, not the science. Mead doesn't even have to give the science a thought, because the policy is so far off,
"[T]he entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable."
Mead adds,
"the global climate movement has become the kind of embarrassment intellectuals like to ignore."
And concludes,
"The global greens don’t want to talk about any of this. They don’t want anybody to reflect on the obvious truth that a [greenhouse gas treaty] will be either ludicrously weak, unratifiable in the US Senate or unenforceable. (Like the Kyoto Protocol it could well be all three.) They are building a bridge to nowhere, and attacking anybody who disagrees as a flat earther. They want to talk about science, not history, policy and the realities of international life. The science, they say, is “settled.”
"To argue with these people about science is to miss the core point. Even if the science is exactly as Mr. [Al] Gore claims, his policies are still useless."
Likewise, the people behind the Breakthrough Institute provide similar advice. For them, the issue is not making conventional energy more expensive (cap and trade), but making alternative energy much, much cheaper. They write,
"Meanwhile, a new climate policy consensus is emerging, one which prioritizes direct investment in technology innovation. This consensus begins with the recognition that the root cause of the failure of the pollution paradigm was the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and their alternatives. No nation-- not even the wealthiest in Europe--is willing to price carbon enough to cover the difference. Until the technology gap is closed, little will be done to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy."
For me, the whole exercise represents a misplaced effort. We should focus our limited resources on making our critical systems and infrastructure more robust and able to handle whatever the climate may hold for us into the future. It's not just warming and cooling we need to prepare for, but earthquakes and other disasters, both natural and man made.
So my advice to journalists like Shelby and Lenfestey is to put the science aside and focus your attention on the policies. When we have a set of policies that are useful and supportable, then we can revisit how science can inform our choices. Put that horse back in front of the cart and you may make some progress.
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