I saw this suggestion in a news item. It comes from Al Gore, who Republicans still revile with a passion. Perhaps the Republicans were right to fear him. Because Al Gore has a suggestion for how the Democratic Party can tip the 2014 midterm elections in our favor.
Make Climate Science the centerpiece of the Democratic Party's 2014 campaign.
Rich donors press Democrats on climate change
By Juliet Eilperin
Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, six other senators, and a 2014 Senate candidate took in views of the Golden Gate Bridge with former vice president Al Gore and some of the nation's richest environmentalist donors.
The $400,000 fund-raiser, held for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, included remarks from Gore, who said the party needs to make global warming a central issue during the midterms, participants said. And Gore called Steyer, who has vowed to raise at least $100 million, Mr. Tipping Point.
How do you inject this into the debate in a meaningful way? Steyer said in an interview during a visit to Washington, where he lobbied a gathering of Democratic governors. That changes what can happen in Washington, D.C.
With the end of President Obama's tenure now in sight, wealthy environmentalists are pushing Democrats to take bolder positions on climate change vowing to emphasize the issue in swing-state contests and threatening to withhold money from candidates who support the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Think about it. The vast majority of Republicans have stuck their necks out by going along with the climate charlatans who rely on distortion and confusion. We have an opportunity to paint the whole Republican Party as a bunch of obstinate curmudgeons who reject science. Best of all the Republicans will have to dig their own graves with more preposterous claims to prove they're not pro-science heretics to the far right of their party. Then the press will be compelled to vette the veracity of those unsupportable claims.
We Can't Wish Away Climate Change
By Al Gore
This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.
Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.
Simultaneously, changes in America's political system including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as a "socialist" any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis-inconvenient as ever-must still be faced.