Climate Change Is a Great Punchline, Mitt

Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/6148672539/sizes/m/in/photostream/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Photoshop by Kate Sheppard

If you didn’t catch Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, you really missed an amazing snapshot of how he’ll treat environmental issues as president: as a laugh line.

Here’s the line from his speech last night. The stage directions are mine:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans … (Pause for effect, look of mild, mocking amusement on your face. Audience will chuckle here.)

And heal the planet. (Another pause for comedic effect.)

My promise (Pause) is to help you and your family. (Cheers.)

And here’s the video:

Did you get the joke? It’s hilarious that President Obama cares about climate change and promised to do something about it. Mitt Romney will totally not give a crap about that at all, aren’t you glad?

The Gulf Coast is, of course, just starting to recover after yet another major storm hit earlier this week. Climate change makes bad storms worse, and higher sea levels—due to both thermal expansion and the melting of the polar ice caps—also makes storm surge and the resulting flooding way worse, too. And Mitt Romney adjusted his schedule to go to New Orleans on Friday to check out the damage. I’m sure everyone there will finds his remarks really funny.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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