Nature Cannot Be Fooled

From Climate Progress: 

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/06/810901/obama-to-nation-climate-change-is-not-a-hoax-more-droughts-and-floods-and-wildfires-are-not-a-joke/

Oooh - Obama said something about climate change that is obviously true! While those fools on the other side, well, they’re just lunatics, right? Imagine how much worse it would be if those lying, evil nutbars were in charge!  Can’t let them win, can we?

Folks, it’s all a distraction, and neither candidate/party is going to do much of anything on this all-important issue over the next 4 years. While Romney almost certainly will not help solve the problem (he barely acknowledges it’s even real at this point), Obama won’t help solve it either (nor has he really done much to help so far), because he’s also a tool of Wall St and big biz, and so he’s never going to challenge the fossil fuel interests to any significant extent. Obama and the Dems will just let things get worse a little more slowly than the other side would. Lots of rhetoric (especially during the campaign), little action.

Unfortunately the political system is badly broken, and the vested interests won’t suddenly change on their own - why would they? Any real chance of addressing climate change is going to have to come from a mass movement of people speaking up, marching in the streets, and demanding action. And that is just far more likely to happen in the US when a president who is completely full of shit (like Romney) is at the helm driving us over a cliff. When “our guy” is in charge, the left is pacified and quiet, even if “our guy” does things just as bad as or worse than the other guys. (There’s abundant evidence of such silence. Here and here, for example.) Can you imagine what would have happened if a Pres. McCain had allowed Shell to start drilling in the arctic right when we’re seeing so much extreme weather and unprecedented arctic ice melting? But Obama did just that, and I only hear crickets.

One way or another, we’re eventually going to get to that point of people marching in the streets demanding action. That seems clear. The question is when. I say the sooner the better. Because the longer we wait, the worse things will get. And if we wait to demand action until it gets so bad that people are seriously desperate, it will be much uglier, and much less likely to be productive.

So put aside the unfounded “hope” for some miraculous 2nd term turn-around and look at this pragmatically. Sure, Obama is way better than Romney in countless ways. That is plain to see. But he is in fact no friend to the climate change cause; he’s actually hurting the cause in a sense, by pacifying the left. And once climate change gets so bad that US society is seriously disrupted, all the other issues will matter very little if at all. While it may seem completely counter-intuitive and a little crazy, a Romney administration just might be the catalyst for change that we need right now.