Enviromental Whackos 0
Not who you think they are. Steve Chapman discusses this in the Chicago Tribune. A nugget:
During last year’s campaign, the National Journal reported, “Of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers who have taken a position, 19 have declared that the science of climate change is inconclusive or flat-out incorrect.” (The exception: Mark Kirk of Illinois.)
Conservatives fear liberals will use climate change to justify heavy-handed intrusive regulation and wasteful subsidies, and they are right to worry. But that’s no excuse for pretending global warming is a myth or refusing to do anything about it. It’s an argument for devising cost-effective, market-based remedies that minimize bureaucratic control.
If today’s Republican attitude had prevailed four decades ago, Americans would not have such vital measures as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Then, many people worried that environmentalism would strangle economic growth and personal freedom. But both have survived and even flourished.
Conservatives once understood that corporations are not entitled to foul the environment, any more than individuals have the right to dump garbage in the street.
I remember my first trip to Los Angeles, thirty years ago.
The sky was a glorious orange; from my hotel in Little Toyko, I could barely see Dodger Stadium about two miles away; breathing was an exercise in filtering hazardous waste from each breath. At the time I lived in northern Virginia, where we had regular pollution alerts and orange skies of our own.
It’s much better now, though from Burbank in the hills east of downtown L. A., you can sometimes see the orange cloud down in the valley.
Republicans clearly long for those good old days when you couldn’t breathe air in Pittsburgh or eat fish pulled from the Delaware River (well, actually, you probably still shouldn’t [pdf], but it’s better than it used to be).
