Raymond Pierrehumbert scores the top slot on Slate over Paul Ryan's climate denialism and general simplistic view on climate and the environment. A great read in general but I'll focus on this:
One of the little fantasies that many of us progressives use to fend off the nightmare of a Romney win in November is the idea that he has flip-flopped so much on his way to a presidential candidacy that maybe once in office he'd flop back to the old Romney and give us a Nixon-in-China moment on climate change. There may have been fat chance of that, but with the choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, even that illusory comfort is denied to us.Yep. I didn't really have that fantasy for a President Romney, but we have seen a small number of Republicans who started acknowledging climate reality once they're away from office. A defeated candidate Romney, I thought, might make the switch. I still wouldn't rule it out sometime for him, but it will take years.
The one I've wondered about is whether a President McCain would've done what candidate McCain promised. While it wasn't as good as Obama's cap-and-trade, it would be better than what we've got. OTOH we've already run a movie version of that with candidate Bush in 2000 promising to regulate CO2 as a pollutant if elected.
We'll never find out what McCain really would've done, but the contrast in this election could hardly be clearer. One party has done something, if not enough, and the other is disastrous.
Still, we will have to have either a change to weaken the Senate filibuster, a climate disaster, or some sitting Republican senators willing to do the right thing before we can get a real national climate policy. It won't be easy.
