Where Did Climate Change Go?
In 2007, Obama called climate change the “epochal, man-made threat to the planet.” But in his State of the Union address last week, the word “climate” was nowhere to be found.
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Obama’s State of the Union address was a masterly exercise in rear-guard tactics disguised as visionary optimism. A section was devoted to fighting climate change, but under an assumed name: “clean-energy technology,” for which he proposed new public investments “that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.” (The second of that trio of goals was as close as he came to pronouncing the dread words.) He set a goal of generating eighty per cent of America’s electricity from “clean-energy sources” by 2035.
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