Environment and the Presidential Debates

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the commentary from the presidential debates on Tumblr and in the news. For the most part, people’s reactions have focused on Romney’s describing his “binders full of women” during a question about women’s rights in the workplace. In short, the argument was that Romney could support women in the workplace because he’d hired them before and made sure that they could get home to take care of their children and cook and do other woman’s work while still working.

 This was not, however, the part of the debate that concerned me. I saw, near the beginning, a question on energy, in which both candidates held their ground considerably well. They both talked about how they wanted to increase jobs in the oil and coal sectors, with Obama touting how he had opened up more public lands to drilling than Bush. Romney, meanwhile, criticized his inability to let the sector expand indefinitely, turning the heat up on Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. Obama replied by pointing out that Romney, during his governorship, publicly declared that a coal plant “killed” and helped to shut it down, which shut down coal jobs.

This happened during the first debate, too. Romney twice pressed Obama on his funding of green energy companies, which Obama did not even attempt to defend.

These discussions of energy were entirely backwards. Neither one mentioned the issue of global warming, perhaps the most pressing issue to our society currently. Neither one defended the closing of coal plants by pointing out that just the direct pollution from coal plants, without even mentioning the long-term effects of global warming, kill thirteen thousand people per year[1]. Romney has rejected the environmental moderation he championed during his time as governor. Obama continues to pretend that “clean coal” is not a complete fabrication of the coal industry.

We ought to have a president who is proud of shutting down coal plants. We ought to have a president who defends the public’s right to public lands, who will stifle the oil drilling industry. We ought to have a president who will stand in front of the Keystone XL pipeline every step of the way, who will note with a smile that oil production is down in America, and who will not replace coal with the slightly-better natural gas.

We ought to have a president who understands that short-term job numbers are not worth a serious risk to society. The current voting priorities of America are irrational and absurd. Environment should be the number-one priority in this election, but it seems all we can do is hope for 2016.

---

[1] http://washingtonindependent.com/97196/study-predicts-13200-deaths-from-coal-pollutants-this-year