This is an interesting
take on the governor’s race in Virginia, in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe
defeated the GOP tea party candidate Ken Cuccinelli in a narrow race. In this piece from the Guardian the British newspaper considers the role that global warming, and in
particular, climate change denial had on the election results.
While
McAuliffe has acknowledged global warming and even made it a central part of
his campaign, Cuccinelli has done all he could to stymie effort to curb greenhouse
gas emissions. As Virginia’s Attorney General he joined a lawsuit in Texas that
claimed that the EPA lacked the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions. He
also used his position of Attorney General in a strategy of harassment
demanding all the personal emails of Michael Mann, a well-known physicist and
climatologist, during his six-year tenure at the University of Virginia. Mann
claims, I think rightly, that the effort to grab all those emails was simply an
attempt to find something, even if it were only one teensy-weensy thing, to
embarrass Mann.
The
piece in the Guardian acknowledges that this was not a single-issue election,
but I believe that they are tapping into something that the domestic press has
yet to delve into. Much about the tea party and Obamacare was mentioned on NPR
this morning when they reported this story, but there was nothing about global
warming or Cuccinelli’s harassment of Mann. And I haven't found anything else in the U.S. press that mentions global warming in relation to this story.
