The Environmental Movement in Retreat

george_willBy George F. Will

The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since “the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held.” So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.

That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, a professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that “the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson,” but the environmentalists’ legislation foundered because they got “on the wrong side of doubt.”

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

9 Responses to The Environmental Movement in Retreat

  1. Hal Groar September 7, 2010 at 8:25 pm #

    George Will is a intelligent man. I don’t know if I agree with his premise here though, I think the reason AGW is dieing is because of people like Dan here! Yep! Dan beat the beast off single-handily. That and a few million scientist called Bull**** on the IPCC. But, for the most part it was Dan. Just giving you a hard time Dan, I liked the article!

  2. paul wenum September 7, 2010 at 9:57 pm #

    Hal, Dan has done an excellent job. Kudo’s to his hard work.

  3. Lone Wolf September 9, 2010 at 7:04 am #

    Dan’s the man!

  4. Lone Wolf September 9, 2010 at 7:16 am #

    Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

    There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

    Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

    Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

    “Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

    Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

    Read the complete story here: http://tinyurl.com/3y3ypqr

    Further information an be found by searching on “thorium energy”

    I can’t find a down side to this.

    I hink it would be good if Dan would post this article.

  5. Rob N. Hood September 9, 2010 at 8:29 am #

    If is sounds too good to be true…

    I wish it was true, but I have my doubts.

  6. Lone Wolf September 9, 2010 at 10:04 am #

    I had my doubts and am still a little skeptical, but I can’t find a downside or anything that would cause me to believe it’s a hoax. The more I dig the more coninced I am that it’s real. Please look a little closer for yourself and see if you can find something negative. I was at a candidate forum last night. There were 8 candidates that varied from Mn House and senate to 1 district congressional. Walz was missing but the independent and republican candidates were there. I spoke with each of the 8 and only 1 of them (a democrat) had heard of thorium. He had studied it and agreed that it is the answer to all our energy concerns.

  7. Rob N. Hood September 9, 2010 at 3:55 pm #

    George Will is a hack. More so now than ever before.

    If this is the real thing, watch out for current industry to lash out against it, especially Big Oil and Coal. Although since it is a mineral at least the mining conglomerates will be all for it I’m sure.

  8. Aaron September 24, 2010 at 2:15 pm #

    Rob, you are part of the reason Obama is losing the support he has, because you all sound so insane and just hang yourself politically

  9. Rob N. Hood October 2, 2010 at 10:21 am #

    Hacky sack. You are thinking of the tea party.

A project of Minnesota Majority, hosted and maintained by Minnesotans for Global Warming.