Year 3, Month 6, Day 24: If There’s A Hole Behind Your Face, Why Not Rent Out The Empty Space?

The STUPID is really thick on the ground in North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer for June 13:

With virtually no debate, the state Senate on Tuesday nixed restricting development on the state’s coast based on global warming science.

Lawmakers passed a bill that restricts local planning agencies’ abilities to use climate change science to predict sea-level rise in 20 coastal counties. The bill’s supporters said that relying on climate change forecasts would stifle economic development and depress property values in Eastern North Carolina.

The bill has sparked outrage in some circles. It was ridiculed this month on the television show “The Colbert Report.” Despite the controversy, it has repeatedly cleared every hurdle in the GOP-led legislature. In the Senate Tuesday, the only comments were a few brief remarks in favor of the measure as a victory of common sense over alarmist research.

The practical result of the legislation would be that for the purposes of coastal development, local governments could only assume that the sea level will rise 8 inches by 2100, as opposed to the 39 inches predicted by a science panel.

This story will never get old. Sent June 13:

It is easy enough to mock the ludicrous attempts of North Carolina politicians to legislate measurement, and certainly the property owners and residents of coastal areas will need something to laugh about after four or five decades of steadily rising sea levels. But it is also important to recognize that this is part of a long-standing battle: ideologically-driven conservative politicians — versus facts and experts.

Republicans have embraced anti-intellectualism with steadily increasing fervor for decades. Science, once extolled as the source of American technological might, is now viewed with fear and suspicion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the GOP’s rejection of climate scientists — whose inconvenient predictions have a habit of turning into inconvenient realities.

A Bush administration official once mocked writer Ron Suskind as a member of the “reality-based community,” noting, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” While the North Carolina legislature has learned Karl Rove’s lesson well, the Atlantic Ocean may not be so obliging.

Warren Senders