If I were to write for the NY Times I would not have even wasted a pixel of screen regurgitating the 30 year rant he is "not engaging in"... I would instead fill all columns with the optimism and tangible solutions our country has ignored and desperately needs to pull or ourselves out of this 'great recession'.
Repairing the devastation of our energy and environmental ignorance of the past and move forward into the prosperity of future. This entire article sounded like a fear, doom, gloom summary of the obvious to push the readers of NY Times to 'believe something should be done' and 'cap N fail' is our only hope and option...
NY Times Krugman - The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.
And we're not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won't take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.
For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled "Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America" — yes, "imminent" — and reports "a broad consensus among climate models" that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, "will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades."
So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They'll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.
.....But the larger reason we're ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don't.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It's also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.
So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I'm not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.
Really? a 'nobel prize winning economist' truly believes that the two bills he has read are a 'true solution' to our energy, environmental and economic crisis that is causing the implosion of our country? Really?
I have far too much respect for him to think that.
Clearly he falls into the whole 'control of the press to secure legislative bill passage' thingy....
