Donaldson & Will spar on global warming

This one is from last weekend, but still worth a look - it's conservative columnist George F. Will, a noted Al Gore basher and global warming denier, taking the opportunity to highlight both, ahem, attributes during an appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos last weekend.

Kudos to Sam Donaldson for taking Will to task for his head-in-the-sand attitude about global warming. As Donaldson sagely grouses to Will, "If you and Senator Inhofe want to continue to have your heads in the sand, I'm going to continue to call you out on it. But, I have grandchildren. ..."

Good for you, Sam. Just because there are people who believe that global warming is a myth/hoax doesn't make it no so. And the deniers who part company with the bountiful scientific evidence that humans are making the Earth warmer deserve our scorn, and diminished credibility.

What really irks me about selfish people who can only look 20 years into the future with the attitude of, "It won't affect me, so who cares?" is that there are so many other benefits of reducing the burning of fossil fuels, even in the minute chance that global warming turns out not to be true. Increased pollution has many other adverse effects - poor air quality kills hundreds of thousands of people around the world each and every year.

Another thing that really gets on my nerves - the idea that drastically cutting our carbon emissions will harm our economy. When I hear people say this, I ask myself if we should hold a funeral for American ingenuity. Can you possibly imagine the global dominance America could enjoy if we took the lead in hydrogen, electric and hydrogen cars; solar, wind and wave power; and alternative fuels. What we really need is leadership in these areas, but if it doesn't come from a fossil, the Bush administration has shown scant interest.

Whether you like Gore or you hate him, the man is right - we really do need an "Apollo-type program to combat this problem." Gore has also often said that global warming "is not a political issue, it's a moral issue." That's right, it should be. But, unfortunately, some people will never be able to get past the fact that he's a Democrat who ran for (and won) the presidency.