If nothing else, Copenhagen is putting the subject of climate change back on the table, and we can afford to take reasonable steps

You can have a search for truth, or you can have blood lust for sensational lies that buttress wacko prejudices. For the Right-Wing Noise Machine, that's no contest. But if you're curious about what's actually at issue, enjoy this "Climate Denial Crock of the Week with Peter Sinclair," found on the new SwiftHack website.

by Ken

I'm not proud to say that I won't be following the goings-on in Copenhagen all that closely. I'm just as not-proud to say that I don't follow issues like climate change, or environmental issues in general, as closely as I should. I don't understand this science stuff any too well. You'll notice, though, that unlike the lying imbecile thugs of the Right-Wing Noise Machine, I have a sense of shame about it, and acknowledge freely that this is a shortcoming of mine, and not of science's.

Let's face it, the popular hostility to science goes back a long way, and surely has to do with that basic American hostility to people who think they're "smarter 'n' us," which becomes especially touchy when it concerns people who actually are smarter by virtue of having taken the trouble to educate themselves rather than cretinously crediting any random firing of neurons that takes place in the void of their brains. That hostility starts on playgrounds with taunting and beating the crap out of smart kids, and in most cases later settles into being duped by the lowly likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

I suppose it's an awareness of the depth (or would it be shallowness?) of their ignorance that makes the Lying Righties so personally pugnacious in a matter like Climategate. As usual, they don't care about truth, which reflects so poorly on their delusional prejudices. Which is why, even after they've managed to have all those e-mails stolen and cherry-picked, it doesn't matter that they have no tools with which to understand anything in them, having committed their souls to the Path of Ignorance.

These are, after all, the same people who bray that evolution is "only a theory," proud that they've chosen to be too ignorant to know what, in scientific terms, a "theory" is. And now these are people who have made themselves too stupid, as we saw when I wrote about Climategate last week, to understand the difference between stolen private correspondence that was part of a work process and a completed, though suppressed, study like the Pentagon Papers, which by its very definition was the most exhaustive and thorough possible effort to document and understand the history of our involvement in Vietnam. Once you've gotten to the point where facts are doody and all that matters is your opinion of them, such distinctions become truly irrelevant.

And just as the RWNM suffers no shame for the thoroughgoingness of its ignorance, it has no reason to shy from mind-numbing repetitions, at ever more surely deafening levels, of its lies and obfuscations. Repetition is always crucial to the selling of theirtalking points. When the victims of their propaganda hear the same nonsense all over, all the time, they have some reason to assume it must be true. Which is why, intense as the competition (and, apparently, low mutual regard) among the likes of Rush and Billo and Sean and Glenn may be, they also know that they need each other. None of them can defeat truth by himself.

The dirty secret of climate-change denial is that there's a whole lot of money in it, and "independent" groups that arise to attack the science of climate change regularly turn out to be mouthpieces for the energy industry. There are, of course, powerful economic interests that stand to take a hit to their stratospheric, record-setting profits if we take meaningful steps to reverse our reckless, unheeding assault on the environment.

The good news is that, contrary to the dogma that we can't afford responsible environmental policies, we actually can. As Paul Krugman wrote in his splendid column yesterday, "An Affordable Truth," in which he expressed optimism about the Copenhagen climate talks:

[I]f things go well in Copenhagen, the usual suspects will go wild. We'll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show -- well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind. We'll also, however, hear cries that climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth.

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy's growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait -- on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

He goes on to explain the thinking behind the "cap and trade" system expected to play a major role in changing our behavior with regard to environmental damage -- you know, the market-based system that was targeted by those RNC "pure" conservatives who are advocating a conservative purity test that includes opposition to cap and trade, because only "market-based" solutions are acceptable! Back to Krugman:

Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of "cap and trade": businesses won't be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they'll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon -- and there's every reason to believe that they'll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that.

As a recent study by McKinsey & Company showed, there are many ways to reduce emissions at relatively low cost: improved insulation; more efficient appliances; more fuel-efficient cars and trucks; greater use of solar, wind and nuclear power; and much, much more. And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.

The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade -- a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems -- can't work.

The truth, Krugman wrote, is that "they're wrong -- again. For we've been here before."

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today's fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Curbing greenhouse gases will be a much bigger and more complex task -- but we're likely to be surprised at how easy it is once we get started.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2050 the emissions limits in recent proposed legislation would reduce real G.D.P. by between 1 percent and 3.5 percent from what it would otherwise have been. If we split the difference, that says that emissions limits would slow the economy's annual growth over the next 40 years by around one-twentieth of a percentage point -- from 2.37 percent to 2.32 percent.

That's not much. Yet if the acid rain experience is any guide, the true cost is likely to be even lower.

He went on to make his case that, far from the depressed economy being a reason to shy away from undertaking such a project, in reality "the prospect of climate-change legislation could spur more investment spending."

Consider, for example, the case of investment in office buildings. Right now, with vacancy rates soaring and rents plunging, there's not much reason to start new buildings. But suppose that a corporation that already owns buildings learns that over the next few years there will be growing incentives to make those buildings more energy-efficient. Then it might well decide to start the retrofitting now, when construction workers are easy to find and material prices are low.

The same logic would apply to many parts of the economy, so that climate change legislation would probably mean more investment over all. And more investment spending is exactly what the economy needs.

I don't suppose there's much hope that the rampaging climate deniers will stifle themselves anytime soon, spurred on as they are by ideological imbecility, a love of the spotlight, and their deep-pocketed energy-industry cronies. And of course the media "watchdogs" are almost as hopeless, as usual with scientific subjects, which they assume can't be made either understandable or interesting to their viewers/readers -- because they themselves don't understand or care.

However, as I said at the outset, at least Copenhagen forces some attention to the subject, and maybe in this regard the attention that the Swifthackers are bringing to it may backfire, as at least some Americans get a glimmering of the real science -- and economics -- of climate change, and the danger of not facing up to it.

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