It looks like Romney’s mockery of Obama’s 2008 pledge of climate action had one positive impact.
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama said tonight to a large national TV audience:
And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet — because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.
Worth filling up a couple of shot glasses, I’d say — though repeating the denier “hoax” frame is not the way to debunk it.
Here’s what leads up to it:
You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy. After thirty years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas. We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day — more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly two decades.
Now you have a choice — between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.
We’re offering a better path — a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet. If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.
Yes, that’s an “all of the above” energy policy. So down one drink and put the other down the drain.
Beats mockery, though. Comments?
UPDATE: Good speech with a great finish. I’d still give Bill Clinton props for the best speech of both conventions. Gov. Jennifer Granholm had the best line of the night:
In Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator; the workers get the shaft.