On Climate Change “Realism”

It was always going to be difficult to persuade the electorate to do anything meaningful about climate change when the impacts were exclusively in the future even though science could easily predict them. After all, how many people would choose pain now over slightly less pain later?

But the effects of climate change are here and now. Furthermore, they are not limited to a handful of states. Insurance rates are soaring all over the country. And yet, the public is mostly unmoved, and the Democrats have been forced to retreat to a posture of “realism” that promotes renewable energy along with the slightly less dirty kind.

Any progress we make at this point will be dependent on the market and the rest of the world. It is stupid and shameful, and hardly an advertisement for our political system, which values the interests of a handful of miners over hundreds of thousands of solar panel installers.