Very liberal Washington Post writer tells warmists to give up warming

Dana Milbank goes back and forth, but ends with this:

Al Gore, for one, seems to realize it’s time for a new tactic. New TV ads released during last week’s blizzards by Gore’s climate advocacy group say nothing about climate science. They show workers asking their senators for more jobs from clean energy.

That’s a good sign. If the Washington snows persuade the greens to put away the slides of polar bears and pine beetles and to keep the focus on national security and jobs, it will have been worth the shoveling.

Milbank’s bottom line: the Warmists should give up Warmism and try something else.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

The interesting thing about Milbank’s column,.or at least the part you quote in today’s entry, is that it very strongly implies that the “Green” movement of Al Gore and his fellows is essentially a political program for which anthropogenic global warming has always been an obvious cover. Government involvement in the labor market and invasive government control of industry has always been the end game, and even liberals know this to be a fact. The bottom line is that Gore was an advocate for these things before the global warming craze came along, and he will be an advocate for those things when the transparent fraud of an incipient environmental catastrophe is long-forgotten. That’s why the most subliterate leftist ignoramus, who couldn’t tell the difference between a cumulonimbus cloud and a volcanic eruption, will descend into a frothing rage over the thought that somebody, somewhere, doubts the theory of AGW.

Leftists have always tried to imbue their political program with the veneer of scientific certainty—the astounding conceit that their politics have been proved scientifically just as surely as the periodic table of the elements, and all that is left is to submit ourselves utterly to the rule of that vanguard of experts who have cracked the code. So Milbank unashamedly dismisses resort to tales of impending catastrophe as a mere “tactic,” while basking in the assurance that something better will come along to hammer down all intellectual resistance to statism. He may even be right. As developments since the fall of international Communism have shown, we have no time even to take a breath, and there is no end to capital-H History. The liberal war on reality assumes new forms, and even if AGW is on the run, that hydra isn’t anywhere near finished.

LA replies:

I don’t know that you can fairly draw that conclusion from the Milbank column. The column, as I suggested, is all over the place, in the typical liberal, relativistic manner; but it does have a surprisingly strong bottom line: the case for global warming has a lot of weaknesses and ought to be dropped. I don’t think you can read the column as saying that global warming has been one tactic to achieve leftist ends, and the tactic has failed, so let’s pick up another tactic. Yes, it’s entirely possible that that is Milbank’s underlying view. But I don’t think, based on this column alone, that we can conclude that it is his view.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 17, 2010 05:57 AM | Send