A Lost Heritage?

This past week the Heritage Foundation, that bulwark of conservatism built on beer money [Coors family], hosted a book event for Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists use Threats, Frauds, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. Author and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute Christopher Horner used his quick tongue to criticize scientists, environmentalists, and the media for utilizing a host of scare tactics and half truths (though he rarely acknowledged that there was any truth to the global warming story).

Naturally, he used scare tactics and half truths to build his case. Horner began his presentation with the now routine first there was a global cooling consensus, now it's global warming so you can't trust a scientist shtick utilized by many warming deniers. Of course that simply isn't true: while the media (as usual) overplayed the global cooling story, there was no scientific consensus as this exhaustive study concludes. [A friend and mid-level Bush appointee has pointed me to a 1970s Newsweek article as a reason for discounting the IPCC report---amazingly, though the liberal media gets it wrong today, they apparently accurately reported the global cooling story then, so no need for all that science stuff!]

The false claim that scientists have a case of thermometer schizophrenia was just the opening act for his thesis that scientists (and any businesspeople calling for action) are in it for the money while politicians are in it for big government power. A blizzard of anecdotes was designed to leave the audience confident in their ability to dismiss this whole climate change thing as a big sham.

Your friendly hugger made the trek across town and was able to get a question in---you can see it all here at Heritage's very good web site. I suggest you first scroll down and read the over-the-top blurb before proceeding to the video or audio. My question is the first of the Q&A, at the 28:45 point in the video. It's not my finest moment of public speaking (fumbling with a microphone while trying to get several quotes right) but I eventually spit it out.

In short, I asked Horner to address the views of Newt Gingrich and Sir John Houghton (a British Evangelical who served as the head of the IPCC science team), both of whom call for action against climate change. My hope was to demonstrate to the audience that not everyone on Team Green can be so easily dismissed.

That didn't stop Horner from dismissing Dr. Houghton with one sentence (utilizing a quote on the need for crisis to create action that I have heard Sir John say as a lament, not a justification for fudging the numbers as Horner seems to imply).

Newt took a little longer, but Horner's basic point was that Speaker Gingrich is an elitist intellectual who has just found a fun problem. After I quoted Newt and hisA Contract with the Earth co-author saying "We favor reducing carbon loading in the atmosphere as a bold forward step" Horner went so far as to say, "Sounds like Newt is speaking in the royal we"---on the video, you can faintly hear my unplugged reply pointing out the uncrowned origins of the plural. No need to let facts stand in the way of a good jab though---whether that be at scientists or a former Republican Speaker of the House. (Stick with the video long enough to hear the next questioner call Newt a "pothole in the street of life." Surrounded by nervous laughter in the room, Horner doesn't blink or come to the Speaker's defense.)

Despite it's name, Heritage seems to have fallen a long way from the roots of traditional conservatism. As David Jenkins from Republicans for Environmental Protection has noted to me, the individualistic materialism of the free-market conservatives (dollar cons as I call them) is in many ways just a cleaned up version of 1960s excess. Both are expressions of individual freedom gone wild.

Russell Kirk (author of The Conservative Mind) said, "There is nothing more conservative than conservation." That's a good heritage but it now seems lost in the woods. Luckily, we crunchy cons enjoy walks through the forest of history.

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