{"id":5140,"date":"2012-09-07T04:30:40","date_gmt":"2012-09-07T08:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/?p=5140"},"modified":"2012-09-01T18:13:29","modified_gmt":"2012-09-01T22:13:29","slug":"year-3-month-9-day-7-rock-and-roll-is-here-to-stay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/year-3-month-9-day-7-rock-and-roll-is-here-to-stay\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 3, Month 9, Day 7: Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post notices that the “GOP platform highlights the party\u2019s abrupt shift on energy, climate”<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This language didn\u2019t just come out of nowhere. At the time, a handful of prominent Republican politicians appeared genuinely interested in tackling climate change. Then-Senator John Warner (R-Va.) was co-sponsoring legislation to reduce the country\u2019s greenhouse-gas emissions. On the presidential campaign trail, John McCain was talking up his cap-and-trade program that would put a price on carbon. (McCain, for his part, was one of the earliest members of Congress to endorse this idea.)<\/p>\n

The 2008 GOP platform certainly didn\u2019t agree with liberals and environmentalists on everything. Far from it. The document put a heavy emphasis on nuclear power, which tends to cause some green groups to bristle (although many Democrats softened their opposition to atomic energy in the years that followed, in a failed effort to woo conservatives on climate policy). The platform also had harsh words for \u201cdoomsday climate change scenarios\u201d and \u201cno-growth radicalism.\u201d Yet the 2008 GOP platform was, essentially, taking part in a debate over how best to tackle greenhouse gases\u2014not about whether the climate was changing at all.<\/p>\n

Skip ahead to 2012, and the GOP platform takes a markedly different tone. That section devoted to climate change? Gone. Instead, the platform flatly opposes \u201dany and all cap and trade legislation\u201d to curtail greenhouse gases. It demands that Congress \u201ctake quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.\u201d It criticizes the Obama administration\u2019s National Security Strategy for \u201delevat[ing] \u2018climate change\u2019 to the level of a \u2018severe threat\u2019 equivalent to foreign aggression.\u201d The platform even tosses in what appears to be a subtle swipe at climate scientists:<\/p>\n

Moreover, the advance of science and technology advances environmentalism as well. Science allows us to weigh the costs and benefits of a policy so that we can prudently deal with our resources. This is especially important when the causes and long-range effects of a phenomenon are uncertain. We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The language echoes an op-ed written by Paul Ryan in December of 2009, which accused climatologists of using \u201cstatistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.\u201d Ryan\u2019s charges were untrue; a number of subsequent investigations into the leaked Climate Research Unit e-mails found no evidence of wrongdoing by the scientists involved. Nevertheless, the insistence that research institutions lack \u201cscientific integrity\u201d remains intact.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We just got one thing to say to you fuckin’ hippies.<\/p>\n

Sent August 31:<\/p>\n

It isn’t just Paul Ryan accusing climatologists of cherrypicking scientific data in order to increase their funding. Conservative politicians and media figures across the country level the same charges, evidence or no. It might be Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, James Inhofe, Michelle Bachmann, or dozens of other climate-change denialists \u2014 but the substance of the calumny is identical: scientists are guilty of manipulating the facts for personal and political gain.<\/p>\n

And who better to make such assertions than the people who’ve made data-mining and math-massaging into a political art form? After all, Republicans ignored intelligence reports on Iraq’s non-involvement in 9\/11 and started a war on utterly specious grounds, support photo ID laws to protect against nonexistent voter fraud, and claim tax cuts for the wealthy will rebuild our economy. Intellectual dishonesty is the preferred modus cogitandi<\/em> for conservatives, who assume that everyone, including scientists, is as mendacious as they are.<\/p>\n

Warren Senders<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post notices that the “GOP platform highlights the party\u2019s abrupt shift on energy, climate”: This language didn\u2019t just come out of nowhere. At the time, a handful of prominent Republican politicians appeared genuinely interested in tackling climate change. Then-Senator John Warner (R-Va.) was co-sponsoring legislation to reduce the country\u2019s greenhouse-gas emissions. On the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,44],"tags":[467,253,207,212],"class_list":["post-5140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-politics","tag-assholes","tag-denialists","tag-idiots","tag-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5140"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5149,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5140\/revisions\/5149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}