Liberals have a responsibility too: make climate change a top issue

(In a brutal news sense, this story is a little dated, but the topic is as current as tomorrow - Robert McLean)

On Thursday when the announcement hit that Trump was taking America out of the Paris Climate Accord, my social media feed predictably blew up. As an environmental journalist with a lot of left-leaning friends, you can imagine what it looked like: anger, frustration, shock, sadness, another outrage from the world’s most outrageous leader. All of a sudden every one I knew was talking about climate change; I’ll admit it was a nice change of pace, but after nearly ten years of covering climate change I also knew it would be fleeting.

A firefighter carries a woman from her car after it was caught in street
flooding as a powerful storm moves across Southern California on
February 17, 2017 in Sun Valley, California. After years of severe drought,
 heavy winter rains have come to the state and the evacuation of hundreds
of residents from Duarte, California for fear of flash flooding from areas
denuded by a wildfire last year. Research has shown that California’s
drought was likely worsened by climate change. And climate change,
 as well, is also leading to heavier, more extreme rainfalls worldwide.

Liberals have been the champions of climate action for decades, but they’ve largely championed it as an afterthought, something that comes near the end of a long to-do list, like the brussels sprouts you conveniently forget to pick up at the grocery store (polling bears this out). When I bring up climate change during chats with left-leaning friends, I often get that pause – that suspended moment – when I can see someone in the group look askance. I can see what they’re thinking, “Again, Jeremy, with the climate change?”

Read the story on The Guardian by Jeremy Hance - "Liberals have a responsibility too: make climate change a top issue.”