WaPo: Electoral College Makes It Harder To Fight Global Warming

by Chris White

The Washington Post blamed the Electoral College for making so-called man-made global warming nearly impossible to “thwart.”

The last two U.S. presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College have actively worked against efforts to end global warming, Todd Cort, the co-director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, wrote Monday in an editorial for The Washington Post.

“At the very least, the impact of the 2000 electoral college vote was a delay of four years in addressing climate change (and it is arguable that even though Bush won his second term with the popular vote, that scenario would have been far less likely were he not the incumbent thanks to the 2000 vote),” Cort wrote.

Former President George W. Bush’s victory set the fight against climate change back several years, he added, because it kept Nobel Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore from kick-starting the climate change warrior movement earlier.

He then went on to blame the Electoral College, whose members met Monday to officially determine the next president, for the advent of Trump — a self-proclaimed climate skeptic who once said global warming was a “hoax” perpetrated by China to hurt American business.

“Hindsight in four years will tell us of the legacy of the Trump administration on climate change, but, despite a recent pledge to keep an ‘open mind’ on the subject, the statements and commitments from the administration to date provide strong reasons for anticipating which way he’ll go,” Cort wrote.

There is a bright spot to the madness, according to the Yale lecturer. At least the international community has a good handle on the tools necessary to confront global warming.

Cort’s suggestion that the international community can now shoulder the weight has become a common refrain among Democrats.

Vice President Joe Biden, for one, said in early December that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are more than capable of filling the void left by a departing Obama administration in the fight against climate change.

Even so, Cort wrote, “the electoral college will have a lasting legacy on all of our lives through climate change. The combination of two administrations headed by presidents who lost the popular vote has and will slow our progress down, and that delay contributes to an ever worsening global climate problem.”

Democrats are blaming the Electoral College for other social ills as well.

New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor told “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd Sunday that the electoral college is “steeped in the idea of slavery.”

Even President Barack Obama got in on the act, telling reporters on Dec. 16 that the Electoral College system a “vestige” of an “earlier vision” of how the U.S. government was going to work.

“The Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states,” he said.

Follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter