Monday, February 22, 2010

WaPo Acknowledges Anthropogenic Climate Change, Says Action is Good for the Nation

The paper of George Will, climate denier, comes out with an editorial contradicting him.
Politicians nonetheless have seized on both the trivial mistakes and the complexity of the science to cast doubt on the underlying and unrefuted truth of human-caused greenhouse gas accumulation. In many cases, it is hard to know whether they are being obtuse or dishonest, and hard to know which would be worse.
And dealing with it is a good thing anyway.
A gradually rising carbon tax made sense even before "global warming" entered most people's vocabulary. Almost as useful would be a simple cap-and-rebate system that required industry to pay for greenhouse-gas emissions. Either would reduce American dependence on dictators in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela while lowering air pollution of all kinds. Neither would require a complicated government bureaucracy of the kind that has understandably alarmed some people while giving others a pretext for opposition. And if politicians can't bear to stand behind an increased tax, the revenue from either proposal could all be returned in a fair and progressive way.
So now their ombudsman is going to slap Will's wrists, right?

No comments: