passage 13 The presidential candidates didn’t talk about the environment during their first debate on Wednesday. Nobody really expected them to; they just hoped that they would. Leading up to the encounter, San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, Inside Climate News, and other outlets put an emphasis on a 160,000-signature request that nine environmental groups, including the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, sent the debate’s moderator( 调解人 ), PBS NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer, urging him to ask the candidates about climate change. Their stories also mentioned ClimateSilence.org, another petition project, run by two environmental groups, Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action, which has been tracking the candidates’ statements on the matter, and protesting the general lack of it. “When President Obama and Mitt Romney square off Wednesday in their first debate, global warming may be the biggest topic that neither wants to touch,” the Chronicle’s David Baker began. While he turned out to be right, Baker and other reporters pointed to a few recent polls that suggested statements about climate change might play well with Democrats and swing voters. Chris Mooney had a nice report—full of big, colorful bar graphs—of the various surveys at The Climate Desk, a reporting partnership that includes The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Guardian, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS’s public-affairs show Need To Know. According to Mooney, the conventional wisdom that climate is a political loser for Obama “emerged following the 2008 economic collapse when many climate advocates were painted as hopeful energy taxers, and a sharp contrast was drawn between helping the economy and helping the climate.” While the issue is still not a “guaranteed win,” recent surveys from the University of Texas, Stanford, Yale and George Mason University, and Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions, a consulting firm, contradict that assumption. None of the mattered in Thursday night’s debate, however, which focused, as expected on the economy and healthcare. As The Hill’s Ben Geman observed, climate change was absent from the first debate.” Another topic that didn’t come up was public lands. There have been a surprising number of calls from within the media recently calling on the candidates’ to discuss the issue. As an excellent 1,900-article by Greenwire’s Phil Taylor put it, Colorado, where the first debate took place, was “a logical place for the candidates to discuss the role of federal lands in providing energy, recreation and job opportunities at a time of high unemployment.”