One of the most enjoyable ways you can help make greenhouse gas industry shills squirm this week, is to see Al Gore's movie,
An Inconvenient Truth. A partial list of theater locations is
here. But Al Gore isn't the only one speaking out. Even some evangelical groups, previously one of Big Industry's most reliable cheerleaders, are having second thoughts:
John Sugg--Global warming and other issues that relate to our stewardship of the planet seem finally to have struck a chord among evangelical Christians.
The ministers, academics and lay activists ... signed the global warming statement encompassed a wide range of beliefs, including 39 evangelical colleges, the Salvation Army and a cross-section of major denominations and churches. As innocuous and as Christian as such a statement sounds, it was a pointed rebuke of the leadership of the religious right and the Republican Party. Up until the declaration, political preachers had dismissed environmental concerns. In many cases, after all, their power relies heavily on claiming the Second Coming is coming soon: Why worry about Mother Earth when you, Tim LaHaye, Ralph Reed and a few others are about to be raptured up to heaven? Such blitheness fits well with the corporate wing of the GOP, which places profits above prophesies of peak oil and environmental disaster from global warming.
Those who refused to sign the global warming statement included America's foremost ayatollahs: Jerry Falwell; the Rev. D. James Kennedy of the mammoth Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in South Florida; James Dobson ...
"There's no surprise at who didn't sign," said Jim Jewel of Atlanta, spokesman for the evangelical environmentalists. "What we did was signal that the evangelical movement has a new cause, beyond just abortion and gay marriage ... This let people know we have more than one voice."
DevilsTower had an excellent piece yesterday on the possibility that climate change may be proceeding faster than feared along with what may become the latest GOP excuse for why it's 'not our fault.'
Hotter Than You Think--The right wing machine has flopped and flailed in all directions looking for something that absolves them of responsibility. It's a natural cycle. Scientists can't agree on causes or effects. It's not even real. And hey, every one of these reports have been produced by the crack researchers at right wing think tanks, so you know they must be true! The latest winner from the "it's not our fault!" parade? It's not the Earth that's getting warmer, it's the Sun.
Given that the greenhouse gas industry has already tried truthspeak, Pat Robertson has tried blaming climate change on God, and one industry funded apologist even compared Al Gore to Joseph Goebbels, all with little effect, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the reality challenged community jumps on this latest solar bandwagon en masse. The 'logic' employed therein would be something like saying that if an out of control truck is barreling towards you on the road, it wouldn't help to try and get out of the way, and it wouldn't hurt to turn your car into the path of the oncoming semi and race blindly into the ensuing head-on collision.
But if you really want to see a 10 megaton head detonation, ask any anti-science Bushbot why spending truckloads of blood and treasure to head off a nonexistent Iraqi threat which might have some kind of highly dubious, long term value is the height of strategic genius, but expending no blood and spending far, far less to address a known menace is just a staggering waste of resources thrown at an unproven danger.