Oh, just read it

This op-ed column was just totally fabulous.

Why America needs a Sputnik moment on climate change, and why it isn't going to happen

Taking quotes out of it doesn't do it justice, because it flows and connects and makes sense as a comprehensive whole.

But I have to at least offer up a flavor.

"However the court of US public opinion – anti-science, anti-intellectual, and driven by a fundamentalist approach to the Bible - is fiercely resistant to reason because (as I wrote last week) it has conflated rationalism with scientific materialism and moral decay.

In both 2008 and 2012 it was only the hardcore candidates denied evolution outright – Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback -  but plenty of others, like Mitt Romney, took the position of theistic evolutionists, but were careful to equivocate sufficiently to allow the grassroots to feel safe in their convictions.

Only the outliers – Jon Huntsman, an out-and-out evolutionist, and Newt Gingrich, an intellectual Catholic who simultaneously accepts the science of evolution and God-as-creator as part of his religious philosophy, adopted a position consistent with reason.

Why does this matter? Well, it just shows how entrenched the forces of opposition are to reason on climate change."

 How's that?

And then there's the finishing lines:

"Imagine for a moment if the argument could be won, and America threw its full weight behind developing the technologies -  agriculture, energy, water management, transport - that could change the way we live.

America had its "Sputnik moment" when faced with the threat of the rising Soviet Union: that put a man on the moon, and laid the foundations for a new era of science and technology that changed the world.

Today, the rising tides of the oceans  needs to spur another great burst of human invention, but unlike the threat of Communism which united the world's most powerful nation, the threat of climate change now divides it. That bodes ill for us all."

He's right, you know.

Read the whole thing.  It's great.

And sadly true.