To listen to the discourse in Washington, you might think that the worst scandal in America right now is Benghazi or the Internal Revenue Service or the Obama administration’s leak investigations or  the now not-so-secret U.S. surveillance programs conducted by the secretive National Security Agency. Or some might choose the frightening state of disrepair into which we’ve allowed the nation’s infrastructure to fall. (A 2013 report says that America’s cumulative GPA for infrastructure rose this year to a D+ — and that it would take $3.7 trillion by 2020 to fix.) And the country’s refusal to deal substantively with climate change is a biggest-scandal contender (though this is not a problem exclusive to this country).