Political Blogs Don’t Seem to Talk About Environmental Issues

Over at the Left Coaster this week, Mary asked the question, “What do you think Bush's legacy will be? In my opinion, the worst legacy of Bush will be the damage to the environment from his policies and ignoring global warming. So why isn't the environment an issue in this election?”

In response, I posted the following:

Why isn't the environment more of an issue in this year's election? Here are some possibilities:

1) it's a difficult-to-understand issue - there's genuine scientific uncertainty that the politically motivated can use to confuse and immobilize voters; education hasn't met the challenge of showing clearly how one's choices are linked to environmental risks.

2) what little that people are hearing about environmental problems is scary; there is a faint awareness by many people that we've probably already screwed up with global climate change. Persistent organic pollutants (such as brominated fire retardants) are subtle and insidious - something you can't see, touch, taste or feel, that is in every mouthful you consume, could be making your kids stupid and unable to have children of their own. Extinction of other species through habitat destruction could be a sign that we're next.

3) Most of the consequences are a generation or more off which let those individuals, who are predisposed not to care about the environment anyway, off the hook. You can move to a new greenfield housing development an hour's drive from work without a care about the environmental impacts because it is something that won't affect you personally.

So, it's a combination of things. People are either confused and scared so that they just don't think hard about it, don't give it a high enough priority compared with economic or healthcare issues, or are willfully blind.

The next question I have is why are environmental topics covered so little by the political and public affairs blogs?