Rolling Stone, a music magazine in the same sense that MTV is a music-video channel, was featured on this morning's edition of Morning Joe. Their cover story is not about the latest escapades of Kanye West or Lady Gaga; instead, they have chosen to write about global warming. Before anyone asks, none of the above recording artists (to my knowledge) have recorded a song which would have spawned this article.
"As the World Burns," is the eyes-bleeding hyperbolic title of the article. Contents: The 17 people whom Rolling Stone calls "climate killers." And the first target of the article: Billionaire investor and ardent Obama supporter, Warren Buffett:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You put Warren Buffett on that list, I thought he was an Obama supporter?
ERIC BATES: Warren Buffett has not only trashed climate change legislation calling it a huge tax saying it will cost jobs, he's also been investing heavily in its failure. He bought $26 billion railroad, the biggest acquisition in his career, a railroad that basically hauls coal. It hauls enough coal to power 10% of the country's homes. A big polluter. He's also added another million shares of Exxon Mobil which is the biggest carbon polluter in the country.
SCARBOROUGH: What do you expect him to invest in? Windmills?
BATES: If you think that climate change legislation is going to pass you might start moving towards greener energy and start moving away from some of the dirtier energies. Because, as a sound investor, you'd think that doesn't have much of a future. He clearly thinks it has a big future.
Warren Buffett isn't the only one who called cap-and-trade a huge tax - Congressman John Dingell, no conservative he, also called it a tax. "A great big one."
The biggest load of bovine scatology, however, came from Melissa Harris-Lacewell, another wise professor from Princeton. This lovely person has a doctorate in political science. While that certainly qualifies her to speak with some authority on things of politics, the premise of this statement is far beyond her area of expertise:
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL (Professor, Princeton University): This ties in to the segment just before that part of what we are dealing with here is a fundamental problem with how government is operating. Responsiveness versus responsibility. The question of climate change is a long-term issue. When you have people like Senator Landrieu making choices in a place that was just devastated by Hurricane Katrina! I lived half my life in New Orleans. It is my house is going to be under water down there because she's making these short-term decisions instead of saying, look, we have to, in a non-partisan way, move forward in a way that's responsible even if it doesn't get us the short-term, two-year, six-year turn-around on re-election.
The premise, of course, is that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming; that global warming is, in turn, caused by the industrial activities of man; and that the subsequent failures of local, state, and federal government were also disasters caused by global warming.
And that premise is the most deadly of all - that anthropocentric global warming has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The Russian, Chinese and Indian governments would all disagree - as would anybody who read the collection of emails leaked in the ClimateGate scandal.
This gang of “Jersey Shore” journalists, with the backing of an unqualified Princeton-issued propagandist, are advocating that we should radically reshape the foundation of the global economy - at a cost still unknown - based on an idea that has not yet been proven. It's a wonder they aren't working for the New York Times.
