Climate Deniers, It's Time to Come Clean

Any politician can tell you, facts rarely get in the way of well-funded fiction. Consider the case of the House Natural Resources Committee of the Utah legislature. They just approved a resolution declaring that “climate alarmists” are pursuing some sort of population control conspiracy. Huh? The push was urged on by the Utah Farm Bureau, a deceptively folksy sounding organization that includes massively subsidized, polluting factory farms in its membership.

Similar nonsense is happening in Texas. Remember, they threatened to secede from the U.S. over new EPA rules that might force them to clean up their belching oil refineries? 

In fairness, we should all pay for the conversion to cleaner energy. We all use the oil and gas from the region. But the point is that their reason for “outrage” isn’t because the science of global warming is bad. It’s because the wealthy elites who own the oil industry like the fistfuls of money they make from dirty industries—without having to pay for the collateral damage. In fact, a new study suggests that if oil industries actually had to pay the environmental costs for the damage they do, they’d be operating at a loss.

The fact that mankind is changing earth’s climate is no longer up for debate. To say otherwise is equivalent to arguing that there’s “not enough evidence” to connect cigarette smoking to cancer. Flash to picture of blackened lungs.

Part of the confusion stems from the corporate media’s simplistic concepts of “objectivity.” Put 1,001 climate scientists in a room. It’s likely that a thousand of them concur that climate change is a huge and growing crisis. One clown at the punch bowl says the whole theory is bunk. Reporters swarm around him. The CNN headline reads “Debate over Climate Change Still Open.”

You can see the absurdity. Another new study just released today shows that all the hoopla over what the flat-earthers call “a giant conspiracy” is ill placed. If anything, the real numbers are actually more dramatic—and global warming is happening faster than expected.

Let’s assume we take the low road for a minute. Let’s chant what big oil wants us to chant: Climate change is some kind of conspiracy…Climate Change is a leftist hoax…

What have we accomplished? Instead of reinvigorating the U.S. economy with innovation and a new kind of purpose, we’ve helped people in a few dirty industries keep their jobs. We’ve killed the potential for creating new green jobs. We’ve crippled any hopes for putting America back to work as a net producer of innovative technologies and goods. And we’ve screwed our kids.

Once we've blown it--the way Obama has blown any chance of real reform in health care, military policy, or the rule of law, we might well join the conspiracy nuts and "frightened dullards," as Hunter S. Thompson called the unimaginative American public. If we all become teabaggers, wave the flag, pray more, and ask Sarah Palin to save us, we'll be playing exactly the tune that Wall Street has taught us to hum.