by David Minkow, via Climate Access

It’s hard to take, frankly. Another presidential debate and no mention of the most important, and most pressing, issue of all. The glaring omission of climate disruption from the presidential campaign represents an escape from reality (anyone else think it’s telling that the final debate was scheduled to coincide with Monday Night Football and the MLB playoffs?) and a lost opportunity that history will judge harshly.

We need presidential leadership on the issue, and I think it’s worth considering not just what the candidates would have said if a debate moderator had found time to ask a climate question, but what they could and should have said. I offer the following as an escape to reality:

“Thank you, Jim/Candy/Bob, very much for asking about where we stand on the issue of climate change. How we answer this question will have a great deal to do with how we will fare with the other challenges raised in these debates.

It is an extraordinary time to be alive. We have the ability to travel across the globe in a single day. We can communicate with the entire world from the palm of our hand. And we have the knowledge of just how marvelous the planet we inhabit is and how interconnected, and thus fragile, it all is.

Our lives and prosperity depend upon a stable climate. We are able to grow abundant food, drink fresh water and develop as a civilization because our planet features relatively consistent weather patterns. So, as the scientists have been telling us for quite a while now, it’s a big problem that our climate is becoming less and less stable. In the last few years, we’ve had more extreme weather events than ever in our history, costing America more than ever to deal with the consequences. And as you may have noticed, our weather is not what it used to be, from ponds no longer freezing each winter to planting and harvesting times out of whack.

What’s driving these changes and extreme weather events is climate disruption. There is overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is driving the disruption to our climate and that our nation, sadly, is one of the major drivers. And it is abundantly clear that climate disruption will get exponentially worse if we don’t do anything about it.

Beyond what the scientists say, we are starting to see the impacts of climate disruption with our own eyes in our communities. At the same time, for those forward-thinking places that are starting to address climate impacts by investing in the clean energy economy, and preparing for more extreme weather events, they are starting to see the benefits of their leadership and importance of believing in American ingenuity and innovation.

Investing in renewable energy technologies is creating jobs and providing training opportunities for our young people.  Jobs in clean energy and sustainability are safe, well-paid jobs you can feel proud of. People and businesses are relocating to communities that have invested in modern, efficient transportation systems or are walkable due to forward-thinking planning. Business and communities are saving money and improving quality of life through smart building design and energy efficiency programs.

Right now, there are courageous, committed and far-sighted individuals, businesses, neighborhood groups, faith leaders and local officials throughout America who are working diligently on these and many other solutions and are trying to figure out how to get the rest of us engaged.

But there are folks standing in their way. There are some who would like to see American’s dependence on fossil fuels continue, benefitting the few at the cost to many. They are pouring money into misinformation campaigns run by think tanks and front groups that are designed to distort media coverage, undermine education efforts and attack the credibility of those working on the issue.

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Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face each other for the final presidential debate tonight. The conversation will focus exclusively on foreign policy — potentially opening up numerous opportunities to talk about climate and energy issues.

If the last two debates are any guide, the candidates and moderator may ignore the issue of climate altogether. But as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly pointed out in a speech last week, clean energy and climate policy will continue to be deeply important to U.S. foreign affairs, and the next president will play a strong role in “shaping the global energy future.”

Indeed, almost every major international issue — energy access, international trade, food prices, technology sharing, military operations — have a deeply embedded climate component.

There are a number of different angles that could be explored in tonight’s conversation. In a preview of the final debate, Brad Plumer of the Washington Post points out the national security implications of a changing climate:

There have been a whole slew of reports in recent years about how global warming could pose a security threat to the United States. The Pentagon even highlighted climate change in its 2010 defense review. There’s the possibility that droughts, floods and water shortages could destabilize key regions, for one. These things aren’t certain—here’s a more skeptical take on the prospect of “global warring” that I wrote a few years ago—but they’re on the minds of plenty of foreign-policy analysts.

Of course, the impact of global warming is, after all, a global issue. After the first debate, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times explained why he thought the final debate was the best place for a discussion around climate, “Global warming, both in its most significant drivers and consequences, remains a global issue.”

Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations touched upon this same issue in a post today. He makes a very important point about why climate change why isn’t just a single issue that can be separated from others:

Climate change is a really big global problem. You don’t need to be convinced of impending doom to believe this – you just need to accept that we’re running some pretty large risks. When the moderator of the last debate half-apologized to “the climate people” for not touching on the subject,  she revealed something important: too many people think about climate change as a special interest issue. It isn’t, and the candidates’ approaches deserve to be debated. This one is simple to tee off: just ask each candidate what he’d do.

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By Brad Johnson

Click the image to speak out before the debate.

1988. That was the year of James Hansen’s now famous congressional testimony on climate change. It was also the first year that climate change came up in the presidential debate cycle. On October 5, 1988, Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Margolis asked Vice Presidential candidates Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle about climate change and fossil fuels:

We’ve all just finished – most America has just finished one of the hottest summers it can remember. And apparently this year will be the fifth out of the last nine that are among the hottest on record. No one knows, but most scientists think, that something we’re doing, human beings are doing, are exacerbating this problem, and that this could, in a couple of generations, threaten our descendants’ comfort and health and perhaps even their existence. As Vice President what would you urge our government to do to deal with this problem? And specifically as a Texan, could you support a substantial reduction in the use of fossil fuels which might be necessary down the road?

Both agreed that it was time to act.

Watch it:

Today, the science of climate change is incontrovertible. The past 17 years have been hotter than 1988 — the hottest year ever recorded at the time. Crushing impacts like drought, wildfires, flooding, sea level rise, and ocean acidification are now hitting American communities. Instead of a substantial reduction in the use of fossil fuels, consumption and pollution have grown exponentially. And, yet, if Barack Obama and Mitt Romney don’t discuss climate change tonight, it will be the first time since 1988 that the issue was ignored during a presidential debate cycle.

That’s right: in 1992, vice presidential candidate Al Gore shamed Dan Quayle and James Stockdale with an impassioned call to action on climate change as they promoted myths of scientific uncertainty; in 1996 Jack Kemp attacked Gore for sowing “fear on climate”; in 2000 Gore made an even stronger case for action as Bush questioned the science; in 2004 Kerry blasted Bush’s anti-scientific record; in 2008 even Sarah Palin described how climate change was damaging Alaska. In a debate with John McCain, Barack Obama blasted McCain’s efforts on climate change for their insufficiency:

So it’s easy to talk about this stuff during a campaign, but it’s important for us to understand that it requires a sustained effort from the next president.

Watch a compilation:

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“Over increasingly large areas of the United States spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”

Rachel Carson wrote those words in her classic book, Silent Spring, published September 27, 1962.

It’s an ironic coincidence that just as we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of her warning on the unforeseen harm caused by pesticides, we’re experiencing the unforeseen harm caused by fossil fuel combustion – an even graver threat to humans and the biosphere (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).

If we stay near our current emissions path, by century’s end, the outdoors may be strangely silent in the summer in large parts of this country and the world, as most species may well be extinct and most (remaining) humans and animals stay indoors (see NASA’s Hansen: “If We Stay on With Business as Usual, the Southern U.S. Will Become Almost Uninhabitable”).

And yet the story of the century gets dwindling media coverage, at most token mention by the president, and, tragically, no mention at all in the highly watched Presidential debates.

Adam Fetcher, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, “defended the president’s silence on climate change during Tuesday’s debate” in an email to The Hill Wednesday:

“Whether it’s on the stump or at the White House, President Obama has long focused on ways to develop clean energy as a core economic pillar. By advocating for the growth of renewable energy, as he did in Tuesday’s debate, President Obama has continually called for action that will address the sources of climate change”….

Fetcher said the differences between Obama and Romney on energy should indicate which candidate is more devoted to mitigating the effects of climate change.

“While Mitt Romney questioned the science behind climate change and mocked it in his convention speech, President Obama will continue to make the case for cleaner American sources of energy that will create jobs and fight climate change,” Fetcher said.

Obama has been widely criticized for this self-imposed gag order on climate. For instance, the great climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert had a piece yesterday in the New Yorker on this:

CLIMATE CHANGE, THE DEBATE’S GREAT UNMENTIONABLE

… the President could never quite bring himself to discuss why it might not be a good idea to burn every gallon—or cubic foot—of fossil fuels we could conceivably bring to the earth’s surface. In the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record [in the U.S.], climate change has become to the Obama Administration the Great Unmentionable, or, as the blogger Joe Romm has put it, The-Threat-That-Must-Not-Be Named.

The problem with the sort of energy debate we saw on Tuesday is not just that it’s fatuous, though it certainly is that. The problem is that you can’t solve a problem if you don’t even acknowledge it exists. The true challenge facing the next President is not how to bring down gas prices, which may or may not come down as a result of global trends. It’s how to move beyond the tired arguments of the past and act as if the future matters.

In the case of climate change, silence isn’t golden, it is fool’s golden!