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Cockburn on Climate Change

You'd think with a name like Cockburn, the hard-lefty editor of CounterPunch would be worried about ultraviolet radiation and an uptick in SPF numerals. You'd be wrong:

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica by offering a "plenary" indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.

Also, "mainstream homosexual" Dan Savage politely asked The Nation how he should get from Point A to Point Clearance Sale without adding to the depletion of the ozone. And answer came there none.

Leaving aside the etymological hints as to what side of the political spectrum energy conservation should fall, the history of the modern environmental movement actually does begin with the right and not the left. Nature-loving gentry with expansive, lush estates were the first to worry about smokestack pollutants making a mess of the clean countryside air and otherwise lowering their property values. Marxists, on the other hand, were always gungo-ho about unfettered industrialization since more factories meant more alienated workers and more alienated workers meant world revolution.

It makes more sense to see evangelical Christians, who are now jumping on the eco-alarmist bandwagon, clamor to save the planet than it ever was to see socialists or socialist fellow travelers do so. Cockburn's plaint is not so much ironic as nostalgic. As for The Nation, well, they float wherever the fetid winds blow, so no surprises there.

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