Should Obama Give a "Hair-on-Fire" Speech on Climate?

Joseph Romm is editor of the online web site Climate Progress. He is also someone I consider to be a friendly fire recidivist. He comes from the long Left tradition of unconstructive criticism. He's now called for Obama to be primaried because of what Romm perceives as his lack of leadership on GHG reduction. When he said recently on Grist that "Science-based (dire) warnings are an essential part of good climate messaging," I felt moved to pen the following response about where I think pinning our hopes on scientific authority is likely to get us.

"In yesterday's America, sure. Maybe in tomorrow's America again, after heat-laden oceans begin to dictate terms and Americans are hungering to make sense of what's impacting their lived experience. Who can say? But in today's America, where un-reality is normative on NBC, not just Fox, it seems naive to expect Americans to rally to something abstract when they're struggling with the exigencies of daily life.

Not that all the effort at polls and messaging is un-important, but is it not more important to be frank about the larger culture and how ideas get propagated, or throttled? As a nation we once shared common stories about events. Half of all Americans once watched the same evening news broadcasts. Today, we have a buffet of choices to describe reality, most of them with corporate underwriters. Why should Americans, busy with life, busy being entertained, want to select from the dystopian, climate story when the utopian story of business as usual is so much more attractive? "Scientific authority" doesn't come from Olympus any longer.

All the green groups combined cannot outspend the disinformation from the petroleum sector, let alone the Chamber, etc. We experienced the Inside Job of 2008 and instead of getting Wall Street reform we got the Tea Party. How did that happen? The thesis of climate candor is a counter-factual and hence cannot be disproved. But if there were a contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville amongst us, I don't think he would give much for its chances."