READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/30/shellenberger-and-nordhaus-go-after-obama-by-recycling-gop-talking-points/

Shellenberger and Nordhaus go after Obama by recycling GOP talking points

They’re back! I’ve been bombarded by people wanting a comment on the new S&N L.A. Times piece, “The green bubble bursts.” How about “naive and dangerous”?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus get coverage in the media because they are green(ish) recyclers of rubbish. They take piles of garbage (i.e. Republican talking points) and repackage them with some green-sounding lingo and then put their green credentials behind them. I have been ignoring them for a while now, but this piece is high profile and even more outrageous than their typical attacks on the environmental community and Al Gore.

The recycling begins in the first paragraph:

Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling — particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling — to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” Obama’s point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

No, that wasn’t written by Karl Rove, although it sounds like it.

“Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires.” You must be kidding. That is precisely the GOP talking point — heck, the GOP even handed out tire gauges to mock Obama on this (see “Will GOP’s cynical lies destroy the chance for serious energy and climate policy?“).

Why would anybody claiming to care about progressive politics or clean energy repeat such a lie? In fact, Obama was asked by a voter what individuals can do to conserve. And Obama stated correctly that measures like proper tire inflation and tuning up your car can save more oil than coast drilling would provide.

To ignore Obama’s entire energy plan and suggest that somehow it can be summed up by “Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires” is to be nothing more than a cynical GOP shill.

Obama has the most comprehensive energy plan ever offered by a Presidential candidate (see “Breaking news — A real energy plan for America: Efficiency now, 10% renewables by 2012, and one million plug-in hybrids by 2015” and a terrific climate plan (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan“). In fact, his climate plan has so much clean energy in it that, to my great surprise, S&N took up my challenge from last year and endorsed it. But you’d never know anything about Obama’s plan from reading this piece.

Let’s continue with a stunning series of paragraphs, in which Shellenberger and Nordhaus reveal their policies to be all but indistinguishable from those of global warming delayers:

Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings — or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore’s. After the release of the documentary film and book An Inconvenient Truth, greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. In fact, public concern about global warming was about the same before the movie — 65% told a Gallup poll in 2007 that global warming was a somewhat or very important concern in comparison to 63% in 1989. Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press’ top 20 priorities.

S&N have never liked Al Gore’s message because he talked about real global warming impacts, and S&N thinks that the public will only buy happy, happy, happy talk about clean energy and green jobs and lollipops [okay, I added the lollipops].

Here they recycle the standard GOP talking points that nobody really cares about global warming. In fact, even though S&N are pollsters themselves, they seem completely unaware of the fact that the overall Gallup poll numbers mask a sharp break between the views of Democrats and the views of Republicans (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP“). It is primarily the GOP that doesn’t care about human-caused global warming — and that of course is not the fault of “greens.”

The Democrat-Republican gulf on warming is the direct result of a major disinformation campaign launched by conservatives that is inherently more credible to conservatives. S&N devote very little effort to detailing and debunking this disinformation campaign because then they would have to assign a large part of the blame for the mess that we’re in to the fossil fuel companies, conservative think tanks, conservative pundits, GOP leaders, and the like.

READ THE REST OF THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE AT: http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/30/shellenberger-and-nordhaus-go-after-obama-by-recycling-gop-talking-points/