Year 2, Month 5, Day 2: Soon They’ll Be Rarer Than Polar Bears

The Tampa Bay Times reports on recent remarks by former Bush Administration EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, who appears to be marginally aware that we’re, you know, kind of in trouble here:

In these tough economic times, it’s no surprise political leaders spend a lot less time talking about combating global warming than about the need to create jobs. But former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman says people should realize the implications of doing nothing.

“A decision you can make is let’s do nothing, it’s too costly (to develop nuclear or solar). But understand you’re going to pay a price down the road,” Whitman said in a Political Connections interview airing today on Bay News 9 at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Whitman, a former governor of New Jersey, is a director of a bipartisan national security think tank called the American Security Project. Last week it released a study estimating that inaction on climate change by 2025 will cost Florida $27 billion, because of hurricane damage, real estate and tourism losses, and electricity consumption.

Moderate Republicans have their own particular weird types of delusion: to wit, that they matter to their own party any more.

Sent April 23 (making up for a couple of days of inaction while coordinating the Violins concert):

Former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman’s words on global climate change are welcome. For Republican politicians, acknowledging the existence of global warming is a form of electoral suicide, but since Whitman is firmly ensconced in the private sector, she presumably feels free to speak without taking inconvenient political truths into account. But the fact is that the so-called “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, where Ms. Whitman pitches her ideological tent, is all but extinct. What’s left is a group of zealots who are fervently pushing an anti-science agenda with catastrophic implications. Like the Bush Administration official who mocked members of the so-called “reality-based community,” today’s Republicans appear to believe that the laws of nature can be neutralized at will, preferably by tax cuts for the wealthy. Ms. Whitman is better able to recognize the reality of global climate change than the sociopathic wreckage of a once-responsible political party.

Warren Senders