Climate and 2012

One of the major contentious issues of 2012 is going to be Climate, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, the United States is becoming more and more skeptical about the climate change crisis.  It’s seen as a sort of red herring in politics for many people, who revert back to the arguments that the climate has changed before, it can change now without us having anything to do with it.

Most countries, this is not so much of an issue.  In most countries, people are convinced by their scientists and intelligentsia.  But the United States has a long anti-intellectualism streak, dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville, and it hasn’t been helped by the politicizing of climate change.  Undoubtedly, part of this is because the figurehead of climate change in the United States is Al Gore, a democrat’s democrat, and a man that even the most restrained Republican has trouble getting behind.

It also doesn’t help that so many people have so much money to lose from the development of green technology.  Coal and oil companies are pouring a ton of money into the research of big climate skeptics, and coal has gone on a massive clean coal campaign, even though there is technically no such thing yet.

And then there is Climategate.  The release of hacked e-mails between scientists to the public that suggest that scientists were fudging their information and had tried to block the publication of certain studies done by climate skeptics, which some of the public has mistakenly interpreted as climate change being a massive conspiratorial fraud committed by Green companies looking to make money.

Which isn’t accurate, obviously, but it still was a blow for the scientific consensus that has yet to gain public consensus.  It’s all seen as Manbearpig in the U.S., just an attention grab and a money grab.

Now, with the Copenhagen Climate Conference not going all that great, it looks like Obama might have a few things to worry about with climate change come 2012.

Now, upon writing this article, Obama is in his second extended meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, a good sign, but maybe not enough to save the conference and get us a deal.

Obama swooped in for the last two days, and if he pulls a decent agreement out of this conference, he will be seen as a master.  It will be a major plus mark in his column.  For the left.  If he doesn’t, he’ll most likely be seen as having tried, but not having done enough.

On the other hand, it’s kind of lose-lose for him with the right.  First off, you’ve got growing masses who can be whipped into a Glenn Beckian fervor over the fact that the government and the elites are lying to us about climate change, and this ignoramus-led brand of pseudo-populism is either going to paint Obama conspiratorially with climate change, or paint him as incompetent for not getting a deal through.  Obama is trying to take the next step in climate change, and the Republicans are taking him back to the very first step and delaying the process by making him prove that climate change actually exists.  Again.

So this is something that Obama can really only make into a victory if he pulls a deal out today.  And follows through with a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol next year.  If he can’t do either of these things, he loses support on the left, while he is vilified on the right.