Of all the wrongheaded ideas proudly trumpeted by America's right, anti-environmentalism occupies a unique position: it is at once the most devoid of a rational or moral foundation and the most dangerous. Let's not mince words: it is selfish, crass, illogical, willfully blind, a denial of the undeniable reality that humans are pillaging irreplaceable natural resources and spewing filth into the air and water and soil at unsustainable rates.

Green-bashers stubbornly negate what is directly before them. In the face of irrefutable evidence that environmental degradation is a mortal threat, they put their hands over their ears, shut their eyes and scream, "Not true!" This isn't about good faith questioning of science, much as these naysayers pretend it is. It isn't about genuine skepticism, much as they want to believe it is. There is no moral imperative underlying their belief (or lack thereof). It's about unbridled hostility at the suggestion that we must all make shared sacrifices. It's about refusing to acknowledge that the environmental movement has been right to sound the alarm. It's about laziness. And greed. And irresponsibility. And colossal shortsightedness. Forget about the tragedy of the commons, this is the abject and gleeful refutation of common sense. Green-bashing exposes the rot at the core of modern conservatism.

Nothing illustrates it better than the impossibly inane assertion, touted far and wide on the right, that this winter's heavy northeast snowstorms somehow disprove global warming. A five-year-old can understand the difference between climate and weather, but apparently it is beyond the ken of grown-up conservatives. What's even more absurd about this mother of all absurd claims is that even if you play their silly game and focus on a single year's data and extrapolate, the conservative argument falls apart. Paul Krugman explains:

If you think conservatives are freaking out over the growing prospects that health care reform will, in fact, happen, wait until you see the freakout over climate change. You see, a snowy winter in the northeast United States was supposed to have proved the climate skeptics right, after all. But a funny thing happened while they were celebrating: globally, this is shaping up as the warmest winter on record.

Green-bashers have had a banner year -- they found a couple of openings, some hacked emails, a few scientists being flawed humans rather than data-processing automatons, and they went ballistic. With funding from big oil, they've engaged in an all-out assault on science and reason, and this assault has been tepidly rebutted, if at all. The rightwing message machine has been in high gear, blasting out misinformation and pseudo-science, cynically sowing doubt. Climate change denialism is just one aspect of anti-environmentalism. Flush from the success of eviscerating meaningful health care reform, conservatives will settle for nothing less than the destruction of the entire environmental movement.

We can go on forever patiently explaining the facts. How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic is a good start. Or Al Gore's latest. But this is clearly more than a debate over facts and figures. This is all-out war. Just ponder how conservatives have turned Gore's name into a rallying cry against environmentalism, against progressivism. It's a testament to the power of framing and messaging -- and the hollowness of today's conservative thinking. To the conservative mind, President Obama can be successfully attacked for wanting to provide health care while George Bush was cheered for treating the Constitution like toilet paper and making war under false pretenses. Similarly, Al Gore can be maligned and despised for trying to protect future generations. You'd think he was trying to kill babies. Think I'm exaggerating? That's exactly what a popular rightwing blogger just accused him of doing.

Another conservative writer goes on about "unsettled science," as though we were engaging in a hypothetical legal exercise about the merits of reasonable doubt. In fact, this is our only planet. It's the only place we can survive. We can't afford to take chances. We can't afford to do anything less than everything in our power to rectify the problem. We have no choice but to be alarmists -- there's no second chance. We get it wrong and we've doomed our children and their children. For what? Because we don't want to recycle? Because we don't want to stop polluting? Because we don't want to bother making sacrifices? Because we don't want some eager young kid who cares about the earth to dictate to us? Because we don't like Al Gore? How profoundly selfish can someone be, to deny what they see with their own eyes: car fumes, bus fumes, truck fumes, factory fumes, chemical waste, human waste, toxins coursing through our waterways, in our food, filth we create in immense quantities turning our planet into a garbage dump. If anything, we should be outdoing one another trying to address the issue, not smugly questioning the need for action under the guise that the science is imperfect. Reversing the damage we're doing to the earth should be a priority for every citizen. Instead, environmentalism is treated like an annoyance that the media will occasionally poll about and that we bring to the fore once every April.

Am I being hyperbolic? It depends on how big you think the stakes are. For me, it's about my daughter's future. The air she breathes. The food she eats. The atmosphere that sustains her. Frankly, I hope global warming science is faulty. I hope the Republicans who are "co-sponsoring a resolution stating that climate change is a "conspiracy" and urging the EPA to "immediately halt" all efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions" are right. But even if it's a 50-50 chance that they're not, how on earth can I dismiss the threat? How can I be so glib, so righteous? How can I live on this precious planet, floating in the middle of nowhere, knowing there's nowhere else for my fellow living beings to go, and risk ruining it? What does it cost me to be vigilant, to care for my home, to be as clean and responsible as I can possibly be, to heed warnings, to live with respect and within sustainable means?

Watch this video from the Heritage Foundation -- if you can stomach it. Note the disdain once the speaker starts discussing the green agenda...

It reminds me of an article making the online rounds and giving people a good laugh. Published in Newsweek back in 1995, it's titled The Internet? Bah! An excerpt:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.

We can smile because our life doesn't hinge on it. But our life does hinge on getting the environment right.

If John Stossel, Fox News, rightwing blogs, Republican legislators, conservative talking heads, rightwing radio hosts, assorted climate naysayers and their ilk want to go around denying the obvious, that's their prerogative, but we should treat them like pariahs for endangering the planet we share. We should shun them for their philosophy of me (first and only). We should be twice as emphatic and vehement as they are, since we are in motion and they are static, we are trying to make the planet healthier and they are sitting on their rear ends wagging their collective fingers at us, pretending to be objective but in fact just being cowards, afraid to do what it takes to undo the damage we've done to the planet God gave us (however you conceive of God). And of course, we should be pressuring our elected officials to take concrete action.

To punctuate my point, watch this:

Cross-posted here

Last week, the International Coffee Organization met in Guatemala (a couple of blocks from my house) to discuss sustainability.  It was taken seriously; three heads of government -- Colom, Porfirio, and Funes -- showed up. Rightly so, roughly 25 million small producers rely on the crop for their living.  And the rest of us consume over 500 billion cups a year. I'm certainly drinking my fair share.

The consensus: coffee producers are getting "hammered" by climate change.  According to the head of the ICO Nestor Osorio, "In the last 25 years the temperature has risen half a degree in coffee producing countries, five times more than in the 25 years before." This pushes growers higher toward cooler terroir, creating another competitor for already scarce resources  on diminishing arable land.  The UN Environment Program believes that an increase in 2 degrees Celsius could end coffee production in Uganda.  Elsewhere, like in India, in the Coorg region, Arabica farms have seen rainfall decrease by a third.  

I've talked to some coffee growers in Guatemala myself, about 3 or 4 months ago.  In addition to the cooler climate, the growers complained of dealing with less predictability in the already sensitive growing season.  These producers also took pride in being all organic, which further increases the vulnerability of the crop.

*Apparently Johnny Cash also once sang "The Best Part of Waking Up." If a video exists and anyone has access, I'd love to see it.

Grist's Amanda Little talked to Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla) after the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Feb. 23 hearing about his views on climate change, which he believes to be a hoax perpetrated by the UN and the IPCC. The interview is an amazing insight into how his mind works.

In a nut shell, Inhofe believes that the UN and IPCC are perpetuating a hoax on the world and that climate change doesn't exist.  Who else is in on it? As Little wisely points out, energy companies, "top executives in all industries," the Pentagon, evangelical leaders, NASA, NOAA, and governments around the world, who are, according to Inhofe, "tied to the IPCC."

Why would they possibly do that? Grant money.  A grand global hoax perpetrated by thousands of scientists (and supported by countless others) because they want to tap into some elusive hoard of grant money sitting somewhere. By forming a consensus, aren't they all competing for the same grant money now? Those who perpetuate this argument should be prepared to look in the mirror. Isn't the best way to make a name for yourself these days (as a scientist or a senator) to be a dissenter? 

Inhofe has become a self-proclaimed champion of "dissenting" scientists, whose views he published in an EPW "minority report." The Center for Inquiry did a pretty thorough take down of Inhofe's report, which included findings that over 80 percent of these "scientists" (almost 10 percent weren't) had "no peer-reviewed publication record related to climate science."  In other words, almost all of Inhofe's crew aren't climate scientists.  

I wish I could just copy and paste the entire interview, but I can't. You should read it.

Today Sarah Palin became a "follower" on her own Facebook account.   Sadly she decided to lock herself in step with the group of opportunists trying to derail needed action on climate change.  That's more going steady than going rogue.

Let me repeat. These people are "opportunists."  Some climate scientists have screwed up, but what they have truly damaged are the political prospects of those of us that understand the need for urgent action not the underlying science supporting climate change.  With a modicum of thought, those who continue to hold up those missteps as proof that climate change doesn't exist would realize that they only speak to the periphery of climate reports not the bedrock truth that humankind is changing the planet and that there will be irrevocable consequences. I'll leave it to you to decide whether they actually put in that effort or not.

Palin's post is a prime example of such an attempted diversion.  She writes, "The IPCC’s supposedly definitive report proving the theory is riddled with serious errors," while bulldozing over the fact that those errors don't speak at all to the core of climate science.  In reality it's a perverse sort of ad hominem attack on the IPCC and the 620 scientists who authored the 4th assessment report. The argument goes: they've made these errors, therefore everything they've said must be an error.  But, in reality, none of these mistakes undercuts at all the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases have raised and will continue to raise global temperatures, a belief held by nearly all climate scientists.

She then tries to back herself up by suggesting that the former head of the IPCC, Greenpeace UK, and the Natural Environment Research Council are in her corner. They clearly are not. They have attacked the IPCC because they believe, rightfully so, that these petty errors can be used by opportunists to distract from the central and unwavering truths of climate science.  Alan Thorpe says as much in the article to which Palin links: 

We open ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the IPCC has strayed from that.

All in all, Palin's strategy is to belittle a serious matter so that she might take a political hack at President Obama and push for a "true free market approach to energy independence" that fails to take into account the clear negative externalities of reliance on fossil fuels. Now that "isn't based on sound economics." And her statement that "America has the proven reserves needed to meet our energy challenges" is just obviously wrong. Ironic that Palin makes a glaring over-reach in a post blasting the IPCC for the doing the same.

The truth is that it is inconvenient for Palin and those she follows to accept the truth and far too convenient for them to try to score political points by attacking those who have the guts, the foresight, and the selflessness to accept that which is unpleasant.  That is the real tragedy of these mistakes; it's made it easier to take the easy road -- as Palin has done here.