Cold Feet on Global Warming

Even though the New Hampshire primary has officially kicked off the 2000 presidential campaign, it is not surprising that a recent Kennedy School of Government poll found that Americans, by and large, are uninterested in this presidential season. One reason is that times are good and the candidates are nibbling at the edges.

On the GOP side, the same old mantra of taxes, taxes, taxes seems to be the leading song choice. This would seem odd now, given the obscene prosperity that has been generated over the past half decade. Not that taxes don't make for great political fodder. It is just that at a time when people are doing well and America is preeminent in the world both economically and militarily, a government-bashing tax cut doesn't seem like the most sellable line. Equally important, to be sure, is the important issue of health care. Democrats are right to seek out the high ground on it (or at least the stable ground on it). But in reality, health care is only a wedge of a much bigger policy pie.

Candidates are sidestepping thorny topics in their search for their parties' nominations. The focus of the debate has remained too narrow, and our nation will reap the bitter dividend from this. Some crucial issues will go unexamined and unconsidered until well after we have made our collective choice.

One topic all these candidates are avoiding, but should address before they retire from this year's national political brawl, is the environment. We should not be reassured by the recent cold snap that has gripped the whole northeast; we are still facing large disruptions in the climate. Larger, that is, than the tornado that ripped apart Oklahoma City, the hurricane that created over $1 billion in damage in North Carolina or the $4 billion in damage caused all across northern Europe by freak windstorms last December.

All of this, and what's still to come is the byproduct of global warming, a phenomenon by which the burning of fossil fuels traps solar heat within the earth's atmosphere, changing global weather patterns. If this theory is correct, then the basic equilibrium that has maintained the earth's natural heating and cooling system for the past 10,000 years is about to be thrown into turmoil. We will be left to try to fix it.

Candidates need to speak up. If they're reluctant, then they ought to be asked. Vice President Al Gore '69 has been strangely silent on this topic. Not that he bears the sole blame; he has had only one challenger and that challenger is losing ground fast. Gore has no desire to expend valuable political energy on this issue. After all, the environment is a hot-button topic that polarizes party radicals on both sides of the fence.

But Gore needs to say something. The American people have shown a broad bipartisan concern for the environment. Texas Gov. George W. Bush was governor when Dallas won the dubious honor of being named the smog capital of America. Bush may have a worthy response to this accusation, but under our current money-guided politics, we'll never know. Nobody is moving this issue to the front-and-center.

Yet, whoever steps into the White House as our nation's next CEO is going to have to grapple with the consequences of our worsening environmental condition. So will all presidents throughout this upcoming century. Avoiding it won't make the problem go away, it will only help it get worse.

When four inches of snow in Boston in January is a national news story, something is wrong. It time to talk about how we might go about fixing it.

Samuel Seidel is a master's student in urban planning at the Graduate School of Design.