A good friend of the site had an opinion on climate change published in The Washington Post the other day. It can be found here, and I have taken the liberty of reproducing Debra Jacobson's comments in their entirety below as well:
Post readers can be forgiven for not knowing a lot about last week’s major international conference in Rio de Janeiro dealing with climate change. That is because The Post didn’t send Juliet Eilperin, its fine environmental writer, to cover it and because it carried few stories [“Results of Earth Summit are far from earthshaking,” news, June 23] on the event and nothing of it on the front page.
If nothing happened, why write a lot about it? Mainly because nothing happened and because this shows that the political powers are acting with all the speed of a 5-year-old told to clean up his room. The difference is that the room eventually will get cleaned up, but the climate will keep getting worse for every bit of delay.
Because there are so few stories about our rush to a harmful way of life, there is little public outcry to do something to slow the process down. Because there is little public concern, the Republican presidential candidates felt safe in saying during their debates that climate change was a hoax.
If The Post doesn’t want to be among the villains that our children and grandchildren look back on as having done too little to prevent the world they will be living in from happening, it should start taking the problem more seriously and help counter the know-nothings who shout loudly while putting politics ahead of science.
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