According to Kennedy's column, here is what Barbour wrote in his capacity as an oil industry lobbyist and (unofficial, anyway) architect of Bush administration energy policy in 2001.
“A moment of truth is arriving,” Barbour wrote, “in the form of a decision whether this Administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.” He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as “eco-extremism,” and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to “trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.”That sounds more extreme than anything Kennedy said in his post. As Kennedy noted, that single memo from Barbour scuttled Bush's promise to regulate CO2 emissions at the forceful urging of then-EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman.
And the Inquirer added today that, "Some climatologists see a link between global warming and increased hurricane activity, but it's not proven." Again, if the Inquirer had bothered to read what Kennedy said, they would have read this sentence:
"...The science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming."For The Inquirer to lump Kennedy in with Louis Farrakhan and Michael Mancavage as "gusts of hot air" is patently ridiculous and a juvenile tactic for the supposed Philadelphia "paper of record." Sure, Kennedy’s rhetoric was a bit strident, but given the urgency of the issue and the scientific basis of his claim, can you blame him?
Maybe the Inquirer should devote more time to understanding this issue and less time to criticizing the blog of Montgomery County Democratic State Representative Daylin Leach (see "The Half-Full Glass" below...and Kevin Ferris apparently showers Rick Santorum with more hosannas today - gag me).
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