Krugman calls it treason

Nobel Prize winning economist, Princeton professor of economics, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is seen by some as an alarmist. On this issue, I don't think one can be too much of an alarmist. We're in a five-alarm fire situation.

Yes, the House did pass climate-change legislation; but as Krugman points out 212 voted against it. And passage of a meaningful bill in the Senate is far from sure.

Some Krugman excerpts:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course. . . .

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Every issue that Obama is tackling, the ones that george bush left either untouched or in a mess -- Iraq, the economy, global warming, health care reform, immigration, politicization of justice, world poverty -- each seems a major, almost insurmountable challenge.

All are equally important, yet the sustainability of our life on this planet has got to be the "most equal" of them all. Who's the opposite of Chicken Little? That's our Paul Broun.

Ralph