The Commandment to Save the Planet
The Commandment to Save the Planet
May 7, 2014
America’s right-wingers are so hostile to the federal government – and to the Constitution’s commandment to ”promote the general Welfare” – that they reject action even when needed to save the planet. A resistance that continues whatever the evidence, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
By Paul R. Pillar
The National Climate Assessment released this week is a thorough and authoritative report that also really shouldn’t be necessary in telling us what we need to know about the underlying problem. The problem is that human activity is changing the global climate in major and mostly undesirable ways.
The evidence has long been very apparent, and the evidence is overwhelming. It includes mountains of data and it includes principles of physics and chemistry. What this latest report does is to relate real, not just projected, climate change to present conditions in the United States, not just to consequences that are more distant in either time or place.
Unfortunately denial is still commonplace, and denial reflects some unfortunate tendencies that discourse in the United States not only on this issue but also other issues often exhibits. There is a tendency not to recognize genuine questions and the difficult decisions that must be made about them, but instead to wish all this away by denying the facts.
There is a further tendency for factual beliefs to stem from policy preferences rather than the other way around. The policy preferences involved may relate to constellations of issues that go well beyond the issue at hand. Thus there appear to be Republican facts and Democratic facts, or conservative facts and liberal facts — even on matters of chemistry and physics, and not just on the social phenomena that would be more closely related to political ideologies.
More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/07/the-commandment-to-save-the-planet/
