Mass Debate Shun.

Abs Tract Painting.

As the candidates once again take to the stage to carp at one another, it's apparent something fishy's going on. While king tides bring the ocean right into city streets along the east coast, swamping one of Marco Rubio's Climate Change Denial debates, wherein he continues to insist it's a global hoax even as waters swirl around his car in the parking lot of the very venue at which his debate's being held, not a word is whispered about what we're going to do by either of the two Presidential candidates (nothing says nothing like nothing from these nothings, so nothing will make us Best).

Instead they rant on about bigger defense spending, more taxes on the rich, and the unarguable, taken-for-granted-that-it's-good: Growth. Specifically, growth of the middle class.

Which is why climate change can never be anything but cursorily discussed: growth.

Cancerous, untrammeled, fossil-fuel-amped, mindless Growth. Stoked and stoked like a fiery engine that even as it glows red-hot from continuous combustion is fed so much more fuel the metal itself starts to meltdown. We've all caught in the China Syndrome: grow grow grow your population, your productive capacity, your urban populations, until we're not only choking to death on each other's fumes, we're suffocating from lack of oxygen as it is inexorably replaced by CO2. The solution?

More Growth.

Even as The Donald rails about babies being ripped out of their wombs, even Hillary daren't use the term suggested by his anti-abortion rant: women are birth-machines, and Trump is a birther. And births equal Growth

But about growth on Wall St? The Fed? Growth fed by Rampant speculation? Not  a peep.

Hillary tries. For just one moment, when Donald was accusing her of wanting to double your taxes, she mentioned that her economic plan would not add one nickel to the Deficit. But, when Donald accused Obama (why is it Hillary and Donald, but no one ever refers to Obama as Barrack?) of doubling the National Debt, she almost brought up the difference between the two, but she wisely glided past that possible riposte, because she knew the vast majority of citizens in the most rabidly Capitalistic culture in the world, have no idea what the difference is between the National Debt and the Budget Deficit, never mind the relationship between the two. Otherwise she could have mentioned that it was the Republican President, rubber-stamped by a Republican Congress, under GW Bush, that also doubled the National Debt, but instead of doing so to put the economy on a sustainable path, they did it to flail it into a red-hot fury in which fair remuneration was impossible during which a grand carnival of excess speculation swallowed up everything in sight. Speculation heralded as necessary for all great enterprises, the necessary fertilizer, the compost on which all human progress grows. Wasn't it just eight years ago that GW Bush, with his own unscrupulous hands, had madly heated the enormous engine of Capitalism until it burst into fragments and wounded everyone it was carrying along with it? And wasn't it he, GWB, who had encouraged that idiotic, crazily exaggerated Stock Market euphoria of Dow at $36,000? (we're barely half-way there after ten years and $20 trillion in QE and accumulated budget deficits later).

And now, even after the CO2 reading of atmospheric forcing has climbed above 400ppm, where it is destined to stay for the rest of our lives, while its already rapid accumulation accelerates, the only solution that either candidate of the world's number one contributor of that gas is to spew more and more of it, at an even faster rate, into our one and only air supply.

Because that's what Donald's anti-abortion bluster amounts to.

That's what Hillary Clinton's plan to "Grow the middle-class" amounts to.

The number one root cause of climate change and global warming is exactly that: the growth of the middle class, more specifically, the American Middle-Class.

Everyone knows this, and there are two responses to it, both firmly rooted in denial:

1) Outright denial of those who share the physical and intellectual paucity of Marco Rubio.

2) Calling the above "climate deniers", while advocating and supporting supposed solutions that only exacerbate the problem, such as energy independence, ethanol production from fossil-fuel-based agriculture, and bio-diesel manufacture from plantations created by burning down rain forests, because they are soaked in ignorance about essential properties of energy and its relationship to money (economics) and Nature (the environment). But they are inextricably entwined.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to argue around something that is so central to our current living standards and how to maintain some form of happiness even as we reduce our carbon foot prince during the purple reign of methane itself requires a surplus of energy to be wasted; personal and mental energy that would be much better spent on other intellectual pursuits. As long as those suits don't include any more useless debates full of clowns and fury, signifying nothing.