Green Point Positive and Green Point Negative is a back-and-forth, temporary mode of publishing here on Earthascope to highlight the reality of big challenges combined with people beginning to make changes to improve the environment.
Why would our government ignore the consensus of the scientific community that global warming is indeed occurring as a result of human activities?
I could offer up several answers including Republicans’ ideological stance against taxing even negative activities (in this case, polluting), ignorance of the mass of evidence showing that we are responsible for the heating of the global temperatures, ignorance that the temperature is actually rising, and of course, people who want to make money off of carbon-intensive industries, namely the coal and oil industries. We also have our fair share of fools.
Marc Morano
But let’s focus on a story from the New York Times last week, which focused on Marc Morano, who is a former spokesman for Senator James Imhoffe of Oklahoma and is a major climate change skeptic — believe me, I wanted to say that he’s a major ________ (choose your own fun word!) but we’ll keep this pretty clean (scroll down, I only call Mr. Morano by his name).
Senator James Imhoffe
This distinction is noteworthy here because Senator Imhoffe is the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, which oversees pollution and toxic substances, and he obviously subscribes to the same type of backward thinking as Mr. Morano. For example, Senator Imhoffe’s page for the EPW Committee today rips President Obama for touting green jobs as part of a strategy to put the country on the right economic track.
Imhoffe’s page reads in part, “Both would employ 700 workers—no doubt a welcome development for Newton, but it represents a net job loss. Moreover, workers at the Maytag plant earned $20 an hour with health benefits; workers at the TPI Composites wind turbine facility, across the way from where Obama delivered his speech, would earn $13 an hour.”
So, in other words, after Republican policies promoting tax benefits to companies to take operations overseas (where labor is cheaper) leads us to have a net job loss (nevermind their deregulation that led to the current economic peril) during the Bush years. Need I mention that median income (in real spending power) declined during both Bush Presidencies?
Promoting Green Jobs
Then, President Obama’s promotion of green jobs — “a welcome development,” according to Imhoffe’s page — leads to Republicans stating that that is not the future because those jobs will start out paying less and will be fewer jobs than before? Hey, we had many more manufacturing jobs before and your party’s policies put us in this economic mess and you ignored climate change and scientific consensus during the entire Bush (p)residency. So President Obama is working to clean up your mess and promote sound public policy. Go ahead, cry.
A Republican saying that a blue collar job doesn’t pay enough? Maybe Mr. Imhoffe is realizing that the number of union jobs leaving the country, never to return because of policies stacked against unionization, championed by Republicans, who have no problem with golden parachutes for executives but throw tantrums if anyone mentions increasing the minimum wage is not the way to go about job creation. Anti-labor and anti-environment. With a short memory. What’s not to love about that?
Back to Mr. Morano
But back to Mr. Morano, who now runs his own website, ClimateDepot.com (that’s right, I refuse to send him a backlink — I don’t want his pages ranking well in Google). His site is an (ugly) attempt at naming anyone and everyone who might say that global warming isn’t real.
According the New York Times story, he actually worked as a reporter for Rush Limbaugh after college, made a documentary where he states that deforestation in the rainforests is overblown, and eventually was part of the effort to, “swift boat,” John Kerry in the 2004 election. How very reputable he seems.
It’s a sad state of affairs when people like Mr. Morano have (or have had) the ears of our policy makers. Check it out:
But some scientists and environmental advocates who have made it their business to monitor Mr. Morano see his reports — the most recent was titled “More than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims” — as far from balanced.
Kevin Grandia, who manages Desmogblog.com, which describes itself as dedicated to combating misinformation on climate change, says the report is filled with so-called experts who are really weather broadcasters and others without advanced degrees.
Chris Allen, for example, the weather director for WBKO-TV in Kentucky, is listed as a meteorologist on the report, even though he has no degree in meteorology. On his Web site, Mr. Allen has written that his major objection to the idea of human-influenced climate change is that “it completely takes God out of the picture.” Mr. Allen did not respond to phone calls.
Green Point Negative when we fail to call liars (or ignoramuses) by name.
Hello, Marc Morano.
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