"We can rewrite history!" "We can do it"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701841.html
Throughout history, there have been all sorts of catastrophes. I’m talking Spanish Inquisition, Holocaust, Crusades, Chernobyl/Three Mile Island, Trail of Tears level (yes, I equate environmental degradation, global warming, and the destruction of our planet with these events). None of these were happy catastrophes. I’ll go out on a limb and wager catastrophes can never be considered happy (It is possible for catastrophes to be hipster, “Stuff that White People Like” ironically happy, but I digress).
However, relatively, these events could have been a lot happier if they didn’t have the backing of their own clap louder cheering squad of supporters and deniers. I.E. Henry Ford and the Holocaust. Religion and….Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, everything else.
Thanks for forcing our collective heads into the sand about the state of our planet goes out to many groups and individuals: oil companies, K stree lobbyists, the GOP. But most importantly, thanks to the media. This national conversation will never come to be as long as they are paid off by our overlords and we keep referencing them as balanced, fair, and a complete source of information.
I’ll let a fabulous blogger named John Cole take over from here, I cannot summon the necessary consternation that this terrible op-ed deserves. It is past midnight on this Monday morning in July, and I am stranded on my urban heat island with no possibility of rescue from a friendly ac unit – unless that unit wants to work for free or is hooked up to a solar panel. As it is I’m paying $200/month for the privilege of running the dishwasher and looking at my gmail a few times/day. 
Today’s evidence is this Michael Gerson op-ed, in which he opens with a story about the endangered polar bears, threatened by climate change, and informs us that their worst enemy is… environmental activists:
Once, the main threat to these creatures came from hunters who lived in lonely shacks and set traps along the ocean shore. Now a threat comes from an unexpected source: elements of the environmental movement, whose political blindness and ideological baggage may undermine efforts to reduce the role of carbon in the global economy.
***
Some Republicans and conservatives are prone to an ideologically motivated skepticism. On AM talk radio, where scientific standards are not particularly high, the attitude seems to be: “If Al Gore is upset about carbon, we must need more of it.” Gore’s partisan, conspiratorial anger is annoying, yet not particularly relevant to the science of this issue.
This points, however, to a broader problem. Any legislation ambitious enough to cut carbon emissions significantly and encourage new energy technologies will require a broad political and social consensus. Nothing this complex and expensive gets done on a party-line vote. Yet many environmental leaders seem unpracticed at coalition-building. They tend to be conventionally, if not radically, liberal. They sometimes express a deep distrust for capitalism and hostility to the extractive industries. Their political strategy consists mainly of the election of Democrats. Most Republican environmental efforts are quickly pronounced “too little, too late.”
Got it? Environmental activists are to blame for not working enough with the people who oppose them, denounce them, mock them, work openly to sabotage their efforts, and have created a cottage industry creating and spreading pseudo-scientific babble.
What twisted bastard at the Washington Post reviews these op-eds and thinks they are worth printing? What kind of jackass believes the real problem regarding the environment is the environmental movement, and not James Inhofe. This is like blaming doctors for not being willing enough to work with the tobacco industry to prevent cancer.
I don’t know why anyone reads the Washington Post op-ed pages anymore. Just a disgrace.
From: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=10880
