Global Warming: The Great Vanishing Election Issue

While the movie The Great Warming is set to open around the country on November 3rd, the subject of the movie, global warming, as pointed out in a recent article in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, has largely vanished as a political issue as we near the election. Instead of trumpeting solutions to global warming candidates are busy making claims on how we can achieve energy independence. Perhaps energy independence in the political world is really a code word for global warming. Then again, perhaps not. In any case, the way things are going neither seems likely to be solved in the near future, if at all. Of course energy independence and global warming are not the same issues. We will probably do quite well even if we remain energy dependent, which is overwhelmingly likely. Conversely, if we fail to deal with the global warming problem the outlook is not good. In fact, from all indications it is downright bleak. It would seem that a challenge for environmentalists is to get global warming into the political dialog and particularly to do so before the 2008 election rolls around.