Paul Krugman's column in today's (Monday) NY Times will have "Conservatives" (you know, the folks that don't want to conserve anything) spitting blood:
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. 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 Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Krugman's first answer is Gore serves as a reminder of the illegitimacy of the Bush presidency: "the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House." Krugman then suggests a deeper reason:
The worst thing about Mr. 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 ultimately, he aruges the reason is that "the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening." Krugman then offers an apt historical parallel:
"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said F.D.R. "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 policy implications, Krugman suggests, are that we will need some kind of tax on emissions or require the purchase of emissions permits (leading to the same result, he argues): "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."
But solving the climate crisis will take more:
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.
This is deeply troubling to Republicans however:
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.
This, Krugman argues, is what leads right wingers to deny the truth of global warming and villify and mock people like Gore and NASA scientist James Hansen who have the temerity to tell the obvious truth:
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. 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.
There are MANY reasons Gore needs to run for President, the main one being that the climate crisis MUST be dealt with at the beginning of the next President's term or it will become an irreversable global catastrophe. Only Gore will make it a significant enough issue during the political campaign to then have the political capital to tackle the issue once elected (and I mean literally once elected).
However, that the notion of a President Gore (likely elected by a landslide) would make right wingers' heads explode is an added benefit.