Last updated on November 13th, 2014 at 11:08 pm
There is no place better for conservatives to wrap themselves up in self-denial and make up stuff than Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace is always very accommodating when it comes to pushing the GOP’s talking points. While he had Karl Rove on earlier in the day to talk about how great Chris Christie is, he focused on climate change later on in the show. Actually, he didn’t so much as focus on climate change as provide a forum for climate change denial and advocate for nothing to be done regarding the environment.
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WALLACE: President Obama in drought ridden California Friday proposing a $1 billion fund to research and help communities deal with the effects of climate change. And we’re back now with the panel. Well, the president’s case may seem a bit hard to make when the eastern half of the country is in the grips of a brutal winter. But as you heard the president say climate change accounts for everything from drought to floods. George? Do you buy it?
GEORGE WILL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: No. And neither does science. But I’m one of those who are called deniers. And the implication is that I deny climate change. It’s impossible to state with clearer precision the opposite of my view, which is that, of course the climate is changing. It’s always changing. That’s what gave us the medieval warm period. That’s what gave us subsequent to that for centuries the brutal Ice Age. Of course it’s changing. But when a politician on a subject implicating science, hard science, economic science, social science says the debate is over, you may be sure of two things. The debate is raging and he’s losing it. So I think frankly as a policy question, Chris, Holman Jenkins, Kim’s colleague at the “Wall Street Journal” put it perfectly, the only questions is, how much money are we going to spend? How much wealth are we going to forego creating in order to have zero or discernible effect on the environment?
Well, what a shocker. Conservative columnist George Will got to just throw a bunch of dishonest crap out there without any pushback whatsoever. Why? Because Wallace isn’t a real news journalist as much as he is just there to carry water for the Republican Party and their ideals. Wallace then used the rest of the segment to speak with three other columnists, Kirsten Powers of USA Today, Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal and Chuck Lane of The Washington Post, and further trivialize the matter of climate change. Because when you want to have a panel discussion on the science of climate change and its effects, the best thing to do is have three newspaper columnists on and no scientists or experts.
Basically, Wallace, Lane, Will and Powers all dismissed any concerns about climate change. Instead, they all seemed to reach a consensus that the United States will continue to consume oil and the rest of the world will as well, so the best thing to do it just get as much of the oil from US land as possible. The oil is going to get used, so might as well take as much as we can for ourselves before it is all gone. Since developing countries are polluting the air anyway, why should we care?
Wallace then ended the segment by asking Strassel why it is called climate change now and not global warming. Strassel decided to outdo Will on the science denial front.
WALLACE: So, Kim, what is going to happen to the climate change/global warming movement? And maybe, you know, because I don’t, when did global warming become climate change?
STRASSEL: It became climate change when you couldn’t prove that there was much global warming anymore, you know. As the temperatures didn’t change. So, suddenly we had to have this catch all term, what was responsible, I mean meant that any change in the weather somehow supported the theory. But this is a political issue for the president. This is what he’s put forward. Remember, the last thing he did not manage to — the only thing he did not manage to put through for his first term agenda was a legislative cap and trade program in progress. And he’s lest (ph) has not forgotten anything. And so, they are under putting pressure. He doesn’t want to do it. It would be deadly politically for his Democratic and Democrats in Congress, and so he’s going to put forward things like executive order and funds in order.
Ugh. This is what happens when you allow agenda driven ‘journalists’ and politicians to get on TV and say whatever they want. Temperatures HAVE continued to increase. The Earth is getting warmer. 97% of climate scientists concur that climate change is a fact and it is caused by human activity. Yet, we are presented with this inconvenient truth as if it is a political opinion. Something between Democrats and Republicans. It is very dangerous to continue to treat this as a political issue that can be debated on. It isn’t up for debate. It is a fact. And it needs to be addressed.
Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).
