What Is It About The Climate Debate That Angers Right-Wingers?!

A lot of political observers in the past few years have noticed that there is no longer any discernible ideology to the Republican base anymore (their willingness to look the other way on the past philosophies of front-runners Mitt Romney and Rudy Guliani prove this).

The main thing-- besides embracing fear and authoritarianism-- that unites them now is being anti-liberal.

Very few issues illustrate this like the right-wing denial over global warming-- and their insane belief that it is merely a conspiracy concocted by Al Gore, the Democrats, and their cabal of socialist scientists to destroy American capitalism forever. This nonsense is just as prevalent as 9/11 'truth' conspiracies, but gets far less attention.

Case in point... Yahoo! Answers has the following open question from Nancy Pelosi (or rather a representative of her office, natch): "Congress is working on legislation to address global warming - what would you like to see included?" You have to scroll down and read some of these responses... they're nutty. Lots of rants about 'junk science', personal attacks at Al Gore (killing the messenger is fun!), rants about liberals coming to take away their cars, and super-hilarious quips about ending the "hot air" coming from Democrats in Washington.

That so many of these type of responses are the same is not a coincidence... they're just regurgitating the same talking points they've been fed from talk radio, cable news, and conservative magazines.

Liberals and/or environmentalists have rallied around the climate issue, and therefore conservatives will not.

Now I wouldn't even care about this, except that it does have an impact (unlike the 9/11 Truthers, who are irrelevant). Scientists and politicians have been debating global warming/climate change since the 1970s when the trends first became apparent. It's over 30 years later and we've done jack shit. And that due in part to the fact that all this noise has created a political climate in which we have to pretend there is questions about all of this, despite the scientific concensus being quite clear. And so we talk in circles for years at a time instead of taking action. That is costing us time we increasingly can't afford to lose.

I have no solution to stop all of this; just consider it a general rant.