Denialism.com

Monday, March 26, 2007

WSJ and the Quonset Hut

The WSJ just can not stand Al Gore, and environmentalism in general. For those with strong stomachs check out today's op-ed Al Gore's Lightbulbs.

The main thing I'll point out, is that they repeat what I call the "Quonset Hut Canard". That is, in order to be a real environmentalist, you have to go live in a quonset hut, eat nothing but berries, wipe with poison ivy and make love to itinerant bears. Or something.

Ever since Al Gore was elevated to celebrity with his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," the political world has been murmuring about a possible bid for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. Those murmurs rose to a low roar on Wednesday, when he granted an audience to two Congressional panels on climate change.

Mr. Gore -- who, if his personal lifestyle matched his rhetoric, would be carrying his possessions in a hobo bindle and sleeping in a boxcar -- at least had the good sense to arrive at the Capitol in a hybrid. "The Goracle" was greeted by throngs of cheering fans and media adulation.

This smear was killed weeks ago but the denialists at the WSJ continue to bleat about energy use as if all energy were equivalent. I could use 1 million killowatts of solar and the environmental impact would be essentially nil, or I could use 10,000 kW of coal and it would be an entirely different beast. The man uses carbon offsets, buys from green suppliers, and does what he can to offset his impact. His whole point is that we shouldn't have to live in quonset huts to be environmentalists, we just need to change the way we use and buy power, not go back to the stone ages.

What a tiresome old load of BS from the WSJ editorial page.

Labels: global warming denialism, WSJ

3 Comments:

The Factician said...

Another point is that even if Al Gore were driving a Hummer, and had a coal generator for his house, it wouldn't make him wrong on his environmental message. It would make him a hypocrite, but it wouldn’t make him wrong.

Given that the main focus these days of Fox and the WSJ seems to be painting environmentalists as hypocrites, that this means we can hope that global warming deniers are losing their influence. We hear less and less that the scientific community is divided.

A guy can hope, anyway.

March 26, 2007 12:16 PM,

Apathy said...

This post has been removed by the author.

March 28, 2007 6:25 PM,

Apathy said...

Just another attempt to ignore those pesky data. Here is The Poor Man's Institute's take on the attack from their Keyboard Kommandos series.

March 28, 2007 6:30 PM,

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