Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum's dismissive stance towards environmental concerns crucial to the future quality of life leaves him unfit to lead.
Speak of "whistling past the graveyard." As glaciers recede, heat waves intensify and the fate of succeeding generations grows more at risk, an oblivious Santorum blithely maintains that human-induced global warming is a fictitious concoction of the international scientific community. His delusional thinking conjures up the following "reasons" for scientists around the world engaging in a conspiracy: to assure a steady funding stream, rein in the fossil fuel industry and aid the left wing in consolidating power in a central government and in eventually replacing national sovereignty with a new world order.
Climate change should not be a partisan issue. It is a survival issue. Santorum gets it backwards when he accuses president Obama of practicing "political science" rather than sound science in formulating environmental policy.
Given this viewpoint, it is safe to assume a President Santorum would not act in timely fashion to curb industrial greenhouse gas emissions and move the country towards stabilizing rising temperatures.
But that's not all. Santorum's demonization of environmental activism is additional evidence of how ill prepared he is to lead the nation in the challenging days ahead. He dredges up a discredited conservative attack line, namely that liberal Democrats tend to worship nature directly rather than God in the traditional biblical sense.
"Earth is here to serve man," Santorum declares, "not the other way around" as Obama and the "radical environmentalists" do.
The Republican candidate has it half right. His fatal flaw is failing to recognize that humanity's relationship with nature needs to be a reciprocal arrangement to perpetuate environmentally sustainable economic growth. By acting in harmony with the environment's natural ebb and flow, human beings can harness the force of nature to further their objectives while assuring uninterrupted regeneration of natural resources.
Santorum's insinuation that Obama and his administration are animalists is ridiculous. Here is where the Democrats are on the side of the angels. All major religions regard the natural world as a manifestation of God's work and as such, consider it humanity's sacred obligation to preserve the earth's natural riches for posterity.
Santorum's exploitative view of nature ultimately translates into an open-ended invitation to plunder the earth's natural resources in unsustainable fashion. Under the logic of his thought, even Yellowstone and our other great national parks would be subject to drilling if fossil fuel deposits were discovered.
Hopefully, voters at some point in 2012 will convey to Santorum that he ought to seek out another line of work.