From The Post Bulletin, 10/25/07:
http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=12&a=313039

Paul Krugman: Republican pundits fume as Gore gathers his laurels

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street
Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Gore's
name.

Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they
thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize
should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama
bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance."

You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change --
therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the
terrorists.

What is it about Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American
people chose Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White
House.

Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President
Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Gore were, I believe,
largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy
from the Bush administration.

And now that Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job
-- to be, in fact, the best president al-Qaida's recruiters could have
hoped for -- the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even
more extreme.

The worst thing about Gore, from the conservative point of view, is
that he keeps being right.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three
years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone
layer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could
easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we
presently face from Saddam."

And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal.

When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog
Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the
messenger.

For the truth Gore has been telling about how human activities are
changing the climate isn't just inconvenient.

For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,"
said FDR.

"We know now that it is bad economics."

These words apply perfectly to climate change.

It's in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants)
that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody
to be somebody else.

Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will
be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common
good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right
thing.

In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on
greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on
emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has
pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax.

We know that such policies work:

the U.S. "cap and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide
has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain,
because the causes are global.

The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from coal burned in
U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air comes from
coal and oil burned around the planet -- and a ton of coal burned in
China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal
burned here.

So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their
equivalent;

it also requires international negotiations in which the United States
will have to give as well as get.

Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial -- but imagine the
reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he
acknowledged these truths at the next debate.

Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should
always be cut, never raised.

It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not
negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved
with tax cuts or bombs -- well, the science must be rejected, and the
scientists must be slimed.

For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the
prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate
change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the
nefarious schemes of -- who else? -- George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Gore:

In his case the smear campaign has failed.

He's taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more
respected, and more credible, than ever.

And it drives them crazy.

_______________________________________________

Harry

From The Post Bulletin, 10/25/07:http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp...

Paul Krugman: Republican pundits fume as Gore gathers his laurels

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street
Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Gore's
name.

Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they
thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize
should have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama
bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore's stance."

You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change --
therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the
terrorists.

What is it about Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American
people chose Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White
House.

Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President
Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Gore were, I believe,
largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy
from the Bush administration.

And now that Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job
-- to be, in fact, the best president al-Qaida's recruiters could have
hoped for -- the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even
more extreme.

The worst thing about Gore, from the conservative point of view, is
that he keeps being right.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three
years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone
layer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could
easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we
presently face from Saddam."

And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal.

When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog
Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the
messenger.

For the truth Gore has been telling about how human activities are
changing the climate isn't just inconvenient.

For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,"
said FDR.

"We know now that it is bad economics."

These words apply perfectly to climate change.

It's in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants)
that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody
to be somebody else.

Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will
be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common
good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right
thing.

In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on
greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on
emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has
pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax.

We know that such policies work:

the U.S. "cap and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide
has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain,
because the causes are global.

The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from coal burned in
U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air comes from
coal and oil burned around the planet -- and a ton of coal burned in
China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal
burned here.

So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their
equivalent;

it also requires international negotiations in which the United States
will have to give as well as get.

Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial -- but imagine the
reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he
acknowledged these truths at the next debate.

Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should
always be cut, never raised.

It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not
negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved
with tax cuts or bombs -- well, the science must be rejected, and the
scientists must be slimed.

For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the
prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate
change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the
nefarious schemes of -- who else? -- George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Gore:

In his case the smear campaign has failed.

He's taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more
respected, and more credible, than ever.

And it drives them crazy.

_______________________________________________

Harry