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"Why are people caring less and less about the environment?"

Ed Kilgore asks. (Kilgore... hmmm.... resist making wisecrack about name....) Why have the "many years of painstaking efforts to explain climate change to the American people and get them concerned about it" come undone? Kilgore offers 3 reasons.

1. Dealing with economic troubles takes precedence. (My question: Isn't an economic downturn automatically making the contribution that environmentalists had wanted to compel? Less production entails less carbon production. Why not celebrate the downturn? It's what you wanted. Or is it that you wanted conscious, deliberate sacrifice?)

2. Maybe it's "a byproduct of the radicalization of the Republican Party." Amusingly, he fails to pair this with the suggestion that it's a byproduct of the radicalization of the Democratic Party. The article is illustrated by a picture of Sarah Palin (wearing a winter hat). Is Sarah that attractive? It's more likely the repelling force of the drastic changes pushed by the party in power.

3. Maybe it's "the determined effort by the hard-core anti-environmental right to dominate the discussion and change its terms." Hmmm. #3 is so much like #2 that my response seems too obvious to bother to type out.

Kilgore concludes:

This is one area of public policy where ?respect for contrary views? and ?editorial balance? is misplaced. Sure, there are many aspects of the climate-change challenge that ought to be debated, and not just between those at the ideological and partisan extremes. But we shouldn?t be ?debating? whether or not the scientific consensus on climate change actually represents a vast conspiracy to destroy capitalism and enslave the human race, any more than we should be debating whether ?death panels? are a key element of health care reform.

So: Crush debate. On this and on health care. Because those people on the other side are terrible radicals.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).