Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, March 16, 2012

Senate's Top Denialist Inhofe Admits That When It Comes to Climate Change the Truth Is Whatever Seems Most Profitable At the Moment

via Climate Progress:
[L]ast night [on] MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow [Show]… James Inhofe (R-OK)… mostly just repeated his well-worn falseshoods about global warming, which Maddow shot down. But there was one remarkable admission from the former Chair of the Senate Environment Committee: “I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.” In short, learning about the (supposed) high cost of the solution is what turned him from a believer in climate science to a denier.
Of course, what matters to Inhofe are not costs in general, but costs to specific stakeholders, especially to the extractive-petrochemical corporate interests who profit from waste and pollution and who pay well for Republican collaboration and misinformation. Inhofe's opportunistic elasticity about matters of fact might seem to hold out the wan upside that a confrontation with the costs of his own denialism in terms of world devastation might nudge Inhofe sooner rather than later make into the camp of concession to the scientific consensus on the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change.

But I fear Inhofe may share in the elite-incumbent delusive daydream that the richest of the rich and their pet enablers will retreat to bubble-dome paradises safe from harm behind robot soldier moats as the planet is reduced to a toxic sewer roiled by starving millions and greenhouse storms. This is, after all, more or less what pampered Americans are already doing who deride ecologists past for predicting climate catastrophe, willfully ignorant or insulated as we are from the world-ending devastation suffered in overexploited regions of the world right now of instability, famine, drought, flood, pandemic wrought by the realities of already ongoing climate change as we waste and pollute and deny away.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

They won't need a bubble dome. A gated community with private security will serve the same purpose.

It's pretty incredible that someone like Infhoe can say the things he does and still hold elected office.