A suburban Texas congressman rants about the conspiracy angle in global warming. Would this level of paranoia really work for him if his constituents noticed?
Thanks to the Baron for noting this article on R-TX31 Congressman John Carter's website.
The Warmers are back.
<span style="font-family:arial;">They were thoroughly discredited just last year in the international "Climategate" scandal. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their pals from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain were caught red-handed, through their own email communications, to have intentionally falsified the scientific data on which they claim that human activity is a leading cause of global warming. Further, they were found to have hidden their own research results that showed world temperature not rising, but actually falling over the past several years.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;">...</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;">Global warming is simply a chicken-little scheme to use mass media and government propaganda to convince the world that destruction of individual liberties and national sovereignty is necessary to save mankind, and that the unwashed masses would destroy themselves without the enlightened global dictatorship of these frauds.</span>
...
<span style="font-family:arial;">Every form of alternate energy should be researched and developed to the fullest extent possible, including solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal sources. We should encourage continued development of hybrid, natural gas, and total electric vehicles.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;">We don’t have to raise taxes or electric bills to do any of this. We don’t have to pass punitive new regulations on homes or businesses. We don’t have to kill hundreds of thousands of oil or coal industry jobs.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;">We don’t have to take anybody’s freedoms, or sacrifice one whit of U.S. sovereignty to any global entity to achieve these improvements for our environment or economy.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;">All of which is why the Warmers have fought against every one of these common-sense solutions for decades.</span>
"Simply." I like that.
Remarkably, this fellow represents the mostly upper-middle class suburbs of Austin in Williamson county (along with a rural fringe heading NNW from there which is not very populated). Are people in Williamson County really so tolerant of this level of fantasy in their public representative?
(Ironically, there is an Edgar Rice Burroughs character, John Carter, a warlord of Mars. I wonder if people like Carter are representing the interests of Mars, rather thna those of their constituents.)
To my pain and sorrow, an ambitious fellow who works with the Williamson County Republican Party did a presentation at the Austin Python (computer language) User Group a few months back for his clever get-out-the-vote semi-automated phone call management software. It struck me as a very cynical effort, but the guy knew what he was doing both technically and politically. I think he would find nothing to object to in Carter's rant. Not because he necessarily believes it, but because it apparently attracts more votes than it repels.
Maybe he's from Mars too.
And maybe the people who might think this is unreasonable aren't aware of it.
(Carter's rant is archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/...