And he has good reasons for it.
by John Hayward
02/28/2012
James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph relates some tense moments with a “liberal-lefty media luvvie” that led rude behavior on his part:
Sharing a car back from the BBC Big Question debate in Cardiff on Sunday I had a tremendous bust-up with one of my fellow panellists which I think many of you would have enjoyed hugely. (Our driver could barely keep a straight face.)
It was prompted when I very vocally expressed my disgust at one of the standard phrases trotted out by Warmists and other eco-loons in these debates (as, of course, inevitably, they did again on Sunday): the one about "preserving the planet for future generations".
The reason this cant phrase makes me want to throw up every time I hear it is that it's such a grotesque inversion of reality. It's not people on my side of the debate who want to ravage the countryside with wind farms (with no provision for decommissioning them), rein in economic growth, introduce wartime-style rationing, raise taxes, destroy farmland and rainforests to create biofuels, and base heinously expensive public policy on hysteria and junk science. It's not people on my side of the debate who are condemning those "future generations" to a lower standard of living and an uglier environment in order to deal with a problem that doesn't exist. So how dare they have the gall to try to take the moral high ground?
Delingpole’s column, and his asterisk-laced exchange with the global-warming cultist, are well worth reading in full. He makes this especially incisive point about another “disingenuous technique exploited by the liberal-left on these occasions: the evasion of argument by turning the debate into an issue of style and character.”
Their "thinking" goes something along the lines of: "James Delingpole is so rude and unpleasant and right-wing that everything he has to say is evil and I'm amazed he gets paid for this stuff and I just wish someone could shut him up or kill him." Yeah, but never mind what you think of me: that's obvious. Where's your counter to my argument, that's what I'd like to know?
[…] As I note in Watermelons, the global warming scare – the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history – has enabled some very bad people to do some very wrong things in the name of "saving the planet for future generations". And yet the eco-loons complain about people like me being rude? And they think I'm the one who should be knifed or head-butted?
“Watermelons,” by the way, is Delingpole’s book, subtitled “How the Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy, and Stealing Your Children’s Future.” It sounds like it might be somewhat rude in spots. You can get it from Amazon UK at the link above, or there is what I take to be a U.S. paperback and Kindle version from Amazon here.
This observation of Delingpole’s dovetails neatly with the Peter Gleick fraud case, in which a global-warming fanatic used dishonest means to steal documentation from the libertarian Heartland Institute, throwing in a little forgery to “sex up” the story for lefty media outlets. What Gleick was trying to accomplish was to somehow discredit Heartland by making their private donor information public.
That’s exactly the technique Delingpole describes: ending rational debate by portraying one side as somehow too… tawdry to participate. Never mind what the Heartland Institute is actually saying, or what information they reference to buttress their arguments. Never mind that they’re much less rude to the warmists than Delingpole, having gone out of their way to invite Gleick to speak at one of their events. (He declined the invitation, then immediately got busy with what the FBI has now been asked to investigate as identity theft and wire fraud.)
Never mind that Heartland’s funding is a tiny fraction of the cash poured into the big eco-radical operations, or the source of their income streams. (Gleick’s own Pacific Institute got half a million bucks from… you and me, without our consent, courtesy of the Obama EPA. The Most Transparent Administration in History immediately began airbrushing Gleick off its Web pages when he got nailed for fraud.)
What really matters is that Heartland got some money from the evil Koch Brothers, so you shouldn’t listen to them at all. Listen only to groups funded by the Obama Administration, which obviously doesn’t have any sort of agenda! What absolute rot. The totalitarian Left has corrupted the public discussion of science into a pitiful state.
Update: Powerline offers a comprehensive update on the adventures of Peter Gleick this morning. It includes a remarkable comparison between the Heartland Institute's tiny $4.4 million budget last year, and the warmist Climate Works Foundation, which has received six hundred million dollars from a single donor.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.
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To read another article about global warming kooks, click here.
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