Year 2, Month 6, Day 12: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

The Austin Statesman runs an AP article on the sudden rash of Republican presidential wannabes jettisoning their previous “well, maybe” positions on climate change, the better to appeal to their knuckle-dragging base:

WASHINGTON — One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders are running away from their past positions on global warming .

All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven’t fully recanted are under pressure to do so.

It’s an indicator of a shift on the issue among conservative Republicans, who have an outsize influence in the party’s presidential primary elections. Over the past few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming’s effects have already begun — from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. . In 2008, 50 percent of conservatives said they believed global warming already is having effects; that figure dropped to 30 percent this year. By contrast, among liberals and moderates there’s been little movement, and broad majorities say warming is having an impact now.

These people are a clear and present danger to all of us.

Sent May 30:

Republican readiness to abandon any vestige of fact-based policy on climate change is unsurprising; these politicians have without exception declared their preferential allegiance to the short-term profitability of their sponsors in the fossil fuel industry. It’s too bad, for the conservative “base” badly needs to hear some plain talk about the reality of global warming and its implications for this country and the world. While tea partiers eagerly imagine the existential terrors of Sharia law, gay marriage, and universal health care, the genuine threat posed by increasing greenhouse gases is ignored, misunderstood and ridiculed. The facts are in: if the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as robust as that for human-caused climate change, we’d have found loose nukes on sale in the bazaars of Baghdad. But no GOP primary candidate dares to acknowledge this inconvenient reality. Our descendants will have harsh words for these willfully ignorant hypocrites and their enablers.

Warren Senders