Barack Obama and Joe Biden say that the climate crisis is “the defining moment for our nation.” Oddly, therefore, global warming was nearly invisible in Obama’s Thursday nomination acceptance speech.
Perhaps that’s because the Democratic ticket invited 85,000 of their closest friends to drive their sedans and SUVs to downtown Denver where they parked in off-site lots serviced by shuttles to Invesco Field (whose own parking lots were off limits due to security), a 76,000-seat stadium constructed from 85,000 cubic yards of energy-intensive concrete to watch Obama deliver a speech that was punctuated by a massive fireworks display.
None of this would have been possible without extraordinary emissions of carbon dioxide in a city that has seen its carbon footprint expand by 24 percent in the last 15 years because . . . it is prospering. According to the Mile High City’s green watch dog, the Greenprint Advisory Council, Denver’s emissions explosion comes “in almost direct proportion to the significant population growth Denver has experienced.”
Paradoxically, the restrictive, prudishly green Democratic Party and its “green” convention were attracted to this frontier city because it is growing (unlike, say, Detroit, which has seen declining population, growth, and CO2 emissions). As my Detroit News colleague Jeff Hadden likes to say (quoting Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds): “I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.”