On CNN Sunday, Rick Santorum told the inconvenient climate truth on CNN and they were not too excited about it. It’s sacrilege and heresy heresy on the left to dispute even the tiniest fraction of anthropogenic global warming theory, (they use the more family-friendly name “climate change”( not matter how insane that fraction is. You just don’t do that in polite high society. It’s a sacred truth.
But Rick Santorum did it anyway, and the Weekly Standard’s editor nevertrump Bill Kristol basically, though not intentionally, agreed.
Santorum said that climate scientists who produce these speculative reports are driven by their funding, which they get from groups who share an ideological point of view, and it influences what they say. That’s the exact same claim the media and “progressives” have made for years about money funding other reputable scientists. Apparently, if the cash cow has a brand name, it’s evil and the scientist is tainted, but if the cash cow comes with a DOT ORG address or a U.N. blessing, then the money is no object and everyone is pure and self-sacrificing. You know, saints.
Santorum threw a nope to that. He also praised Trump for dropping that alarmist report last week on a holiday weekend, being as it was produced by entrenched bureaucrats seeking funding and not subject to political appointment by the administration that the people voted into office. The Deep Green State, you know.
Rick rightly blamed bad forest management for the scale of the fires in California, a fact that is in dispute in the press but which is scientifically irrefutable. They didn’t clear the brush. The brush burned. Right again Rick and Donald.
“The question is, how much does man contribute, number one, and number two, what can man do to actually change it, and those are the two big issues which we really don’t talk about,” said Santorum in his overarching point. In other words, it’s impossible to have reasonable debate about the topic because dissent is quashed and motives are impugned and solutions can’t be reasonably worked toward.
You can watch below. Especially watch Bill Kristol at the end.
On the MAGA-right, Kristol is public enemy #(in the top 10), but here he manages to turn Trump-bashing into an endorsement of Santorum’s overall premise that climate science is driven by leftist political aims more than practical solutions.
“Conservatives have good policy arguments, in my view, about how to deal with climate change, or how to ensure against it, to the degree that it is caused by humans, and to the degree it would have real bad consequences down the road,” he said. He then attacked Trump by saying that his attitude and insults shut down the possibility of real debate to create good policy. “Where there are reasonable debates to be had, and reasonable policies where you could address these problems in a market-friendly, non-government-bureaucracy intrusive manner, that would be more effective in my view, but Trump is just–it’s impossible to even have that discussion with Trump.”
“Trump just attacks everyone’s motives, attacks everyone’s, you know, makes it seem like there’s no reasonable position on the other side,” he said.
That’s exactly what Santorum said. You can’t have the debate because everyone’s motives are being attacked. Under Trump, that goes both ways. But BEFORE Trump?? Well it was just the conservatives, just the people skeptical of socialism as a cure for climate who had their motives attacked and were made to seem like they had no reasonable position.
They agree on that. And it’s true. It hardly matters who you blame for it. The truth is that Bill Kristol’s hopes for free-market friendly solutions rest on the tolerance of the left for debate on the issue. And that tolerance is zero.