WASHINGTON — One issue missing from the second presidential debate Tuesday night: climate change.
In her post-debate interview, moderator Candy Crowley of CNN named climate change as the one topic she planned to ask about but was not able to due to time constraints.
“I think 20 years from now,” said Manik Roy, vice president of strategic outreach with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Arlington, Va., “people will look back in disbelief that climate change was not a topic of the debate in 2012.”
The candidates circled the issue while discussing job growth and gas prices. “We’ve got to make sure we’re building the energy source of the future,” said President Barack Obama, “not just thinking about next year, but 10 years from now, 20 years from now. That’s why we’ve invested in solar and wind and biofuels, energy efficient cars.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had a similar rhetoric: “I believe very much in our renewable capabilities; ethanol, wind, solar will be an important part of our energy mix.”
It is important to address climate change as it relates to the economy and energy independence, but it does not give the issue enough weight, Roy said.
“Neither candidate is talking about the larger problem, which is global warming,” said Daniel Kessler, spokesman for 350 Action Fund, a grassroots movement focused on the climate crisis.
Some may say the term, global warming, is taboo during the election season, but 72 percent of Americans said global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress, according to a March 2012 joint study from Yale and George Mason universities.
The study, which focused exclusively on environmental policy, also indicated 68 percent of Americans want the United States to make a large- or medium- scale effort to reduce global warming, even if those initiatives have large or moderate economic costs.
“We are facing a climate crisis and it’s incumbent on our leaders to take up this challenge,” he continued. “And silence isn’t getting to that.”
“Climate change is creating a new normal,” said Bill Riger, spokesman for The Climate Reality Project, the nonprofit founded by former Vice President Al Gore. “We’re seeing more heat, more droughts, more floods. We’re going to be inching a lot closer to a circumstance that is harder to reverse.”
The National Climatic Data Center reported that September 2012, along with the same month in 2005, is the hottest September since 1880, when record keeping began. In the 2012 crop year, more than 2300 counties in 48 states and the District of Columbia were designated as disasters due to drought by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Mainstream dialogue has established the idea that specific weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, but experts say it may be time to rethink that notion.
“Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change,” NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies’ James E. Hansen wrote in the Washington Post in conjunction with the release of his study, Perception of climate change. “…For the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.”
The League of Conservation Voters, along with several environmental groups, collected and delivered 160,000 signatures to NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer, the moderator for the first presidential debate held October 3, asking for a question on climate change. But Lehrer did not ask any questions about the environment. In the second debate, Crowley also missed the opportunity to question the candidates on global warming.
The third and final debate is Oct. 22 at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., with foreign policy slated as the focus.
“Climate change is a foreign policy issue,” Kessler said. He pointed to extreme droughts and resource wars affecting the developing world.
“If you were to have a truly robust discussion on foreign policy you would bring topics of climate change,” Roy added. “And Florida is ground zero for climate change impacts.”
Obama and Romney have one last chance to inform the American public of their stance on global warming and sway the 58 percent of undecided voters indicating global warming is one of the most important issues in this year’s election.
“We can’t pretend that this problem isn’t happening,” Rigler said.