Now He Tells Us!

Via Brian Beutler, Michael Gerson isn't making me feel any better about his character by publishing a post-White House column on how global warming is a serious problem, a well-designed cap-and-trade program could seriously mitigate the problem, and China and Russia shouldn't be used as excuses for inaction. I, too, believe all that stuff. Inconveniently for me, I've never been a top aide to the President of the United States, which is always a good situation to be in when you'd like to see action taken on a cause.

Meanwhile, Gerson somehow manages to parcel blame out evenly between conservative Republicans like Gerson, Gerson's boss, every boss Gerson has ever had in his career, Gerson's colleagues, and Gerson's subordinates all of whom have been fighting serious action on global warming tooth-and-nail and unspecified liberals whose unspecified "hysteria" has contributed to the problem in an unspecified way.

Comments

Looks like Scully was right- Gerson is a shameless jerk.

Posted by boo | August 15, 2007 9:05 AM

What's with the new site layout? Definitely a downgrade.

Posted by trouc | August 15, 2007 9:07 AM

If liberals want something, Republicans can't do it. Doing something about global warming would hand a victory to liberals, and that is something the Bush White House will never voluntarily let happen.

I've long thought Al Gore should write another book called "Leaping from a 30 Story Building is Bad for You." After the right "debunk" it, the herd will be thinned enough to get to work on global warming.

Posted by MikeJ | August 15, 2007 9:08 AM

Ahhh, yes, Robert Samuelson Disease! "Global warming is a problem, we need to take steps to address it right now, but...but the hippies! The hippies are annoying! You see what a spot this puts us in!"

Posted by Jake H. | August 15, 2007 9:22 AM

I don't have any particular interest in making excuses for Mr. Gerson, but in his defense, standing up to a US president is no easy matter. More have failed than succeeded. That's not to let Gerson or others off the hook, just to note the degree of difficulty we're talking about here.

Posted by Brandon Claycomb | August 15, 2007 9:31 AM

standing up to a US president is no easy matter

Yeah, advocating for your beliefs is just so haaard. It's hard work! I mean, it's not like we're talking about the future of the entire human race, or anything important like that. Who among us has the strength to withstand Dim Son's juvenile putdowns? Hell, he might call you a "[ne]rd blossum" or get his daddy to brand you a "chickenshit".

No, better to keep quiet.

Posted by rb | August 15, 2007 9:47 AM

And you would get China to play along how, exactly?

Posted by James Robertson | August 15, 2007 9:49 AM

As a side note, Gerson is pretty glib in saying that global warming is a problem "publicly affirmed by the current president". Did I miss something? The only substantiation I could find in a google search was a story about cute little polar bears and a speech in denmark that was so full of the passive voice that my nose started bleeding.

Did Bush flip-flop on this and no one but Gerson knows it?

Posted by jonathan | August 15, 2007 9:49 AM

Cap and trade and mitigation? There's a sweetly embalming soporific notion for you. CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere at any level of emissions beyond natural equilibrium (pre-Industrial Revolution). The terrible thing about GW is that simply doing some middle ground version of less of the bad stuff won't cut it. Which means that we're not going to be able to get around to the business of reducing the CO2 that's already in the atmosphere. Since we've only seen around .7C of the predicted bad stuff and though things are odd they're hardly intolerable, it's important to understand that we've already bought a good deal more warming: oceans have accumulated a good deal of heat and will slowly give it up to the atmosphere. So, things like arctic ice melt (dramatic changes in albedo) and tundra thaw (trapped CH4) are going to provide non-CO2 feedbacks to the system even if we turned off all of our co2 sources today at noon and left them off for 100 years (the approximate lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere).

I've seen a phrase somewhere that referred to the "penumbra" of a notion. Even big ideas and disturbing facts only cast tiny "penumbras" for individuals. As big as a hat brim. It takes a gun in the face -- like in A Good Man is Hard to Find -- to motivate most of us. AGW isn't a gun in the face. It's a vague something bad maybe 50-100 years from now. That something may simply be sweatier summers and warmer winters or it may be a rock through the hull of civilization. Who knows? I suspect that our grandchildren will, and they'll be pissed and poorer.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | August 15, 2007 9:52 AM

But Gerson is right!

You can't blame the firemen, just because they were drunk when the alarm went off and they had let the fire engine rust and the hoses rot and had been ignoring all of the other alarms so that most of the town burnt down. And sure, they were also taking a lot of money from the arsonists, too.

But it's not their fault!

If those damn hippies are going to keep yelling "Fire!" every time a building starts burning, well, of course the professionals are going to ignore them.

Posted by thag | August 15, 2007 9:57 AM

Re Samuelson

Speaking of Samuelson, he also has a column in todays Washington Post right below Gersons.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/14/AR2007081401331.html?sub=AR

Posted by SLC | August 15, 2007 10:22 AM

My first reaction on reading that Gerson was writing anything (back a few weeks ago) was that Gerson was the guy whom Bush used when he needed a nice set of finely polished lies and BS.

With somebody like that, you start trusting him only *after* he's given *good* reason to show that he's changed. Gerson hasn't; this doesn't surprise me.

DSquared has a nice article on this: The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101': http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html

Prime quote: "The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world."

Posted by Barry | August 15, 2007 10:43 AM

As soon as the
Siberian permafrost bogs thaw we are all doomed. Anyone really believe the US and the rest of the world can begin to reverse global warming in ten years?

Posted by but Al Gore's house uses electricity | August 16, 2007 2:18 AM

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rifkin9aug09,0,1108771.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions%20rel=%22nofollow%20nofollow%20nofollow%20nofollow%22

Posted by damn link | August 16, 2007 2:20 AM