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Monday, December 7, 2009

In Defense of Andrew Sullivan

One of the reasons Andrew Sullivan criticized neoCons is their climate change denial rhetoric.

He says: "I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy."

It is an important time that Mr. Sullivan chose to make his statement, because the Copenhagen summit is upon us.

As many as 56 newspapers in 45 countries are making a unified statement to encourage a successful conference.

Here is an excerpt from the joint statement:
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
(Editor & Publisher). The oil barons are behind a massive campaign to generate denial of the global weather reality.

They have lost in the courts, lost in the EPA deliberations, and have lost the people too.

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