Sasha Issenberg lays out the Democrat’s problems here and one of those includes that 127 million Americans vote every four years in presidential elections and only 78 million vote every two years in the other off-year elections. And those who tend to miss out on the off-year elections happen to be the young, diverse, urban, and mobile voters who would help send Democrats to the White House. The trick is to figure out how to get those Democrats to commit to voting. And then of course we have to hope or rely on the fact that if this one party is in office, they will actually carry out huge social, economic and political changes on America.

It seems more likely that the way the issue of climate change will really be addressed is if we first address the problem of the influence of money in politics. It was once recognized in an interview conducted by Sally Ranney, co-founder and president of the American Renewable Energy Institute. In 1979 she interviewed Jimmy Carter, president at the time and cited something he had said in an earlier speech: he said Americans lacked a moral responsibility when it came to protecting the environment. She asked if he still felt the same way and Carter responded, “I think it is a lot worse now; the country was not divided into red and blue states then and money didn’t completely control the campaigns.”

This interview was conducted in 1979 and things are only getting worse. The public is not being educated properly.