The Political Climate: an ongoing commentary on the NH Primary and Climate Change

Foster’s Daily Democrat’s Sunday paper was filled with green debate.  This article reports that researchers are questioning how realisitic it is to believe that ethanol will become our nation’s saving grace in efforts to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions.  Tas Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkley told Foster’s, “Biofuels can be produced from biomass on a small scale.  They may satisfy local rural needs…[but] [w]e cannot produce them from any source on a scale commensurate with our current level of liquid fuel consumption.”

 Scientific inquiry into climate change is analyzed in another piece where the influence of advocacy and political partisanship is brought into question.  According to David Brown, NH State Climatologist, “only a minority of scientists let politics influence their research.”  However, Massechusettes Institute of Technology professor, Richard Lindzen, disagrees believing “it is probably impossible to find studies that are completely neutral because the issue has been politicized for the past 30 years.”  In another article, “Warming debate centers on human role,” Lindzen states that, “we have only seen very small warming” and “Changes over such short periods of time tell one nothing about the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.”  This, of course, is not the opinion of most scientists.  The Union of Concerned Scientists presents the prevailing view.  Maggie Hassan, Democratic state senator from Exeter, NH, also promotes this “inconvenient truth.”  In an editorial to the Exeter News Letter, Hassan writes that global warming, and the role that humans have played in it, is a pretty “common-sense” concept.  Inspired by a powerful thunderstorm as well as Al Gore’s movie, Hassan declares it is time for our nation to finally act.