Twenty years ago, Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush gathered the nations of the world in Rio to confront the challenge of global climate change. Two decades later, the challenge is more real, and the damage of climate change more pervasive, but we are further behind than ever in addressing the issue. With each passing day, the danger and the urgency only grow.
Promises of action from both political parties have been replaced by a conspiracy of silence.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the chances of Congress acting on this issue is rapidly approaching zero. How dramatic and sad that twenty years later, as nations gather for a second time in Rio, we have failed to prove the conventional wisdom wrong.
Thomas Paine described today’s situation well. As America fought for its independence, he said: “It is an affront to treat falsehood with complacence.” Yet when it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of today’s naysayers is only matched by the complacency of our political system.
In the United States, a calculated campaign of disinformation has steadily beaten back the momentum for action on climate change. Proponents have cowered in the face of millions of dollars of phony, contrived ‘talking points,’ illogical and wholly unscientific propositions and a general scorn for the truth wrapped in false threats about job loss and tax increases.


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