Perhaps this ambiguity reflects the fact that politicians had had “no serious discussion” about carbon emissions in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, as Nicholas Kristof noted in a New York Times op-ed last Thursday. In an editorial from Sunday, the Washington Post attempted to explain the government’s intransigence: “If you strain for a reason to delay action on climate change, it’s that science and technology are evolving.” It criticized the do-nothing attitude and argued that, in the face of uncertainty, “the intelligent response is to buy insurance.” But the Post did not explain what it meant by insurance. The editorial board sounded ready to spend some money, but like its counterparts in New York and Los Angeles, it did not specify whether it thinks the Stern report provides sound advice, or merely suggests the need for some. To its credit, however, the Post was one of the few papers to carry more than one news article about the report, including a piece from last Monday headlined, “In Britain, All Parties Want to Color the Flag Green,” which described the widespread popularity of the environmental movement in the U.K..

That situation is still a long way off in the United States, especially among government officials. It is unimaginable that George W. Bush would take a cue from Tony Blair and contribute an op-ed letter to a newspaper, let alone one that advocates action on climate change. American reporters picked up some of that slack, but the Bush administration’s apathy on this issue denied them the fodder that allowed their British colleagues to be more probing in their coverage. The same has been true of reporting on the November 3 announcement by the World Meteorological Organization that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2005. And the same is true of the press reports rolling out on the U.N. Climate Change Conference that began three days ago in Nairobi, Kenya. If there were even a glimmer of hope that the Stern report, or any of these events, could provoke action by the U.S. government, we might have gotten more from our journalists.

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