Thank You For Killing the Planet
A Columbus Dispatch op-ed today by Jonah Goldberg, editor of the National Review online, trots out the absurd claim that global warming is nothing more than a “green scare.” Goldberg goes on to attack Al Gore as a “scaremonger” and the local Dispatch editors chime in to attack Gore with the headline “Gore’s Green Scare Conveniently Avoids Facts.” Well, here’s a fact for you. The Dispatch has not endorsed a Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and the paper is owned by a prominent Republican family that owns the local Republican Party and rents the Democrats as needed.
But getting down to facts, Goldberg belittles Vanity Fair for saying that global warming is a “threat greater than terrorism.” Goldberg also dismisses the National Review’s old Cold War Red Scare partners at Time magazine for being worried about global warming.
Here’s a fact you won’t hear from the Dispatch, Goldberg or the National Review: George W. Bush’s own Department of Defense Security Planner Andrew Marshall led a team of risk assessment experts who found global warming to be a greater threat to U.S. national security than al Qaeda in the next 20 years. Marshall drafted Peter Schwartz, the former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell Group, among other conservative forces, and they came up this fact: that the climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.” The Bush administration has done everything to suppress the secret report by its own risk assessment team at the Pentagon. The secret report concludes that global warming posed a “threat to global stability [that] vastly eclipses that of terrorism.” This was the lead story in the British newspaper the Observer, on February 2, 2004. Where you won’t read about it is in mainstream corporate Republican newspapers like the Columbus Dispatch, which still want us to believe (much like the tobacco industry) that global warming or the relationship between smoking and cancer are simply scientific debates.
They claim to have facts. What they have is a lot of money and propaganda. Thank you for killing the planet.
Looks like the GOP is doing a little pre-emptive “swift-boating” of Gore in case he wants to make a 2008 come-back. As usual, they ignore their own reports to do so.
Gore has said a lot of good stuff on the environmental issue. Too bad the mainstream media keeps recycling that gaffe about his inventing the internet. He actually is more thoughtful than GWB and many other pols.
A lot of things are more dangerous than terrorism. A lot more people are harmed by pollution, ruthless employers, anti-consumer protection laws, and military recruiters than are harmed by terrorists.
Of course, in schools they tell us the only dangerous things are terrorists, violent crimes, and petty drugs.
Perhaps its time we wake up.
Al Gore was weak on the environment as VP and he is partly to blame for the mess we are in now. Clinton/Gore persistently hurt the Earth while claiming to protect it. East Liverpool comes to mind.