Andanh.com

The environment appears to be the forgotten issue during this year's presidential election. That's why we should view this year's Earth Day celebration as an occasion to put environmental issues on the table.

Here are four crucial ones:

• Fuel economy standards. Motor vehicles generate about one-fourth of all carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere in the United States, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Controlling the emission of carbon dioxide, the chief cause of climate change, will require a reduction in the amount of fuel used.

Which candidate advocates that we drive less and rely more on mass transit? Which one insists that we improve fuel economy standards and plug a loophole that holds light trucks and some SUVs to a lower standard? And which one wants to invest in new technologies and renewable fuels and support electric, hybrid and fuel-cell cars?

• Reducing our reliance on and eventually ending our use of coal to generate electricity. Electricity generation is responsible for about 40 percent of fossil fuel-generated carbon dioxide, with coal making up about half the total, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new -- an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

He sprinkled his debate performance last week with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn't on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates' words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100-years-in-Iraq comment.

Obama also made a pair of cynical promises that are the sign of someone who is thinking more about campaigning than governing.

He made a sweeping read-my-lips pledge never to raise taxes on anybody making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year. That will make it impossible to address entitlement reform anytime in an Obama presidency. It will also make it much harder to afford the vast array of middle-class tax breaks, health care reforms and energy policy projects that he promises to deliver.