The fearful, eager to be comforted and saved, now take great hope that President Barack Obama gave eight sentences to the topic of climate change in his inaugural address.


If only the president thought the same way about debt, for the stubborn among us believe that our failure to use a newfangled lightbulb will cause less harm to a grandchild than will runaway spending and unsustainable IOUs.

In any event, the president did not offer climate change specifics. His remarks were soaring and rhetorical, and the specifics were left to the speculation of correspondents and pundits. They came up with new rules for home appliances, the Environmental Protection Agency further clamping down on the use of coal and the belief that we should be using more renewable fuels.


But just once couldn't a president pat us on the back? Is there anything this guy would pat us on the back for? Why, when we are hectored about climate change, is it always the United States that must do something?

Over the past two weeks or so, there have been stories out of China telling of air pollution so dangerous in Beijing that the readings were off the charts. A smog, so foul and so poisonous, has hung over the city to the point that people can't see across the street and they have been advised to stay indoors. Flights have been canceled. Infants have been hospitalized, along with the elderly.

I want the name of one infant who has been rushed to the hospital in the United States because of the damage we have done to air quality.

Every day the Pioneer Press prints an Air Score. It's on the weather page, where I noted that the record high temperature for Jan. 22 was 51, in 1942, neither here nor there, but interesting. Monday, our Air Score in the Twin Cities was 23. The chart reads from zero to 500, with zero to 50 being good and working up, or down, to a reading of 301-500 being hazardous. When they say they were off the charts in Beijing they mean they were way beyond 500, up to 755 on Jan. 12, a measurement of PM2.5, or particulate matter that comes out of smokestacks and exhaust pipes and the coal-burning stoves of Chinese farmers.

China is booming and the government looks the other way on the ruinous effects of the boom on the environment.

We are not so much booming, but our government looks directly at us and tells us that by means of programs and regulations still being dreamed up we are going to rein in climate change -- in complete delusion, it seems to me, that the climate has been changing since the beginning of time. It wasn't that long ago, cosmically speaking, that we here in St. Paul were under ice.

More importantly, and what we never hear, is that if we are going to allow ourselves to believe that man can change the climate, then we had better mean all men, everywhere. I would sooner have hoped to hear Obama say: "You know, the United States has done a pretty good job with our consciousness raising. It's time that we demand that other nations around the world join us in the belief that we have to be careful, we have to husband our air and water for the generations yet to arrive, we have to work together for clean and renewable energy. I'm talking to you, China and India and Asia and Russia."

I know there are distinctions between pollution and climate and weather. But taken together they are of a piece. We have every reason to be proud of the measures already taken in the United States. And I am sure that more measures are forthcoming. Some will be wise and make sense. Others will merely mean new forms of tax revenue for the always-growing government and will have nothing whatsoever to do with what is called climate change.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray or 651-22805474. Soucheray is heard from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays on 1500ESPN.