Joe Romm is highlighting this extraordinary assertion from Robert Brulle, a prominent academic who writes often about environmental affairs:
By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.
This broadside follows on the heels of the State of the Union address, in which President Obama pointedly did not mention climate change or global warming. Silly me, I thought climate hawks would be too down with the blues to cast recriminations--for at least a day or two, anyway. But Brulle's charge is easily matched by David Roberts at Grist, who also bemoans what wasn't said in the President's speech:
This is a failure on Obama's part. A moral failure, a failure of leadership, but also, I would argue, a political failure.
In stark contrast, Roger Pielke Jr. has a different take:
I am amazed to see views that have been espoused by The Breakthrough Institute, in The Hartwell Paper and The Climate Fix go from being outside the mainstream perspective on climate policy to being highly consistent with the approach now being advocated by the US President. This is good news for climate policy and politics, even if it is hard for some to accept.
Indeed, I think it's safe to say that this news will be unacceptable in some climate quarters, and that attempts will be made to recast it as anything but a victory for Pielke Jr. and the Breakthrough Institute. And those attempts won't be pretty.
