Conservatives thinking only of the most vulnerable amongst us

You know you're in the land of the Disingenuous and Cynical, when NRO and the Wall Street Journal's op ed page start speaking high-mindedly about the poor.

In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn't much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe's famous formulation, a "hoax." In January, six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, five of whom had served under Republican Administrations, met with the current administrator, Stephen Johnson, for a panel discussion in Washington. Panelists were asked to hold up their hands if they believed global warming to be a real problem, for which human activity was responsible. Every one of them, Johnson included, raised a hand.

But where there's a will there is, indeed, always a way. The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn't matter -- let'?s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal laid out the logic as follows: "The problems associated with climate change (whether man-made or natural) are the same old problems of poverty, disease, and natural hazards like floods, storms, and droughts."? Therefore "?money spent directly on these problems is a much surer bet than money spent trying to control a climate change process that we don'?t understand."? Sounding an eerily similar note, a column published a few days later in the National Review Online stated, "We can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions."

The entire column by The New Yorker's resident Cassandra of Climate Change, Elizabeth Kolbert, is most definitely worth a read. She describes the huge amount we spend on delicate instruments measuring the effects of climate change... which our current crew of political leaders then blithely ignore.

Oh. I'm sorry. That's not fair. Preznit has boned up on the subject.