Last week, with the RNC Convention, Romney raised more than a few eyebrows with his comments on climate change:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family. (Business Insider)

He paused in there just enough to get a laugh from the audience about Obama’s audacity to care about things like climate change. And this did not go unnoticed. The Examiner called it a “bizarre… laugh line”. Uri Friedman wrote for Foreign Policy that this might be the “most controversial line” in the speech:

Critics swiftly derided the comment. “That climate change laugh line is going to be in every documentary from the latter half of the 21st century,” Matt Novak wrote on Twitter. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted that Romney’s “dismissiveness was appalling.”(Foreign Policy)

There clearly is a partisan divide on these issues, but as Fuentes-George notes on his blog, environmental issues have had Republican support in the past. Over at Legal Planet, there are some thoughtful posts by Matthew Kahn and Dan Farber about the partisan divide. Farber usefully shares his own attempt at making an objective side-by-side comparison as well.

One only needs to follow the blogs of the Sierra Club and similar environmental groups to discover very quickly who they think the best choice for President will be. Below is the infographic from a North Carolina chapter. Unfortunately, Obama himself seems to be less committed to doing something about climate change than he once was (energy biz). The most recent evidence of this may be his decision to OK drilling in the arctic (Reuters).