Lindsey Graham's calculated nonsense

If you want to feel really pessimistic about the politics of climate change, head over to Kate Sheppard's place, where you can read Lindsey Graham trying to find a rhetorical bridge between questioning global warming and supporting efforts to reduce carbon emissions. What he comes up with sounds a lot like nonsense. But then, that's as good an approach as any when you're reasoning with an irrational position.

Back when I interviewed Graham, he was trying out some of the same rhetoric, and I walked away pretty depressed. It seemed to me that Lindsey Graham 1) believed in climate change and believed that it was a problem, as that was the only explanation for the time he'd sunk into the issue, and 2) believed that the Republican base's antipathy towards Al Gore and environmentalists had become so overwhelming that the only way to convince them to cap carbon emissions would be to persuade them that doing so had nothing to do with atmospheric temperatures. And I really have no reason to think that Graham is wrong on that, or that I know grass-roots Republicans better than he does.

A lot of liberals think they're going to win this argument by convincing everyone that global warming is real. Graham seems to think your best shot is dispensing with the need to convince anyone that global warming is real. He might be right, but that best shot is a long shot, and that means the likeliest outcome is failure.

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