The Black Republican

I've got a new toy. NewsGator (which I'm now using as my feed reader, having dumped Bloglines) allows you to set up an RSS feed based on the results from an Internet search. So as an example, if I had a blog devoted entirely to cranberries, I could search for new mentions of "cranberry" across the net.

I've been watching the results of my new keyword search feed, and you might guess what word - what name - I chose as my keyword.

In a post at Ezra Klein, John from Dymaxion World quotes an interview by Dave Roberts with Jeff Goodell, who in turn mentions our patron.

I haven't the foggiest idea who any of these people are either, but they all do an extremely good job of sounding breathless and important.

DR: You mention Americans' ignorance about where electricity comes from.

JG: Everyone I talk to can tell me the price of a gallon of gas to the tenth of a cent, but I've not found a person -- except for one guy at a reading last night who had a solar panel -- who could tell me what they pay for a kilowatt of electricity. We're completely divorced from the price. If you look at electric power bills, you will see they often make it very difficult to know exactly what you're paying.

Mr. Goodell, here's a tip: it's the number on that line at the bottom after it says: "YOU OWE:" Don't worry, I'm a Republican, but unbelievably I don't charge for this service.

In any event, Mr. Goodell makes the following point:

When I was working on this book as I spent some time looking at slavery debate. During the slavery debate there was all this stuff: oh, you can't abolish slavery, the farms will collapse, what are you going to replace this labor with, we don't have people, who's going to pick our cotton, everything's going to fall apart. The great thing Lincoln said is, that's not the issue. The issue is, is it right or is it wrong? You make that decision first and then you decide how to do it. Global warming is reaching that moment.

Interestingly, John seems to advocate ignoring Lincoln's concept of argument for justification, so the environmentialist movement can proceed directly to "work out how best to do it" - whatever "it" may be. As I point out in the comments, even in places like London's Guardian newspaper will we occasionally hear the truth that the global warming Chicken Littles have not yet made their case, and their headlong rush to spend our money trying to fix this "problem" is just a smokescreen to hide their political ambitions.

Given the times, I'm neither surprised nor overly alarmed at their reach. We've got more important things going on, and most people seem aware of that. But all in all, I wish these guys would leave Abe's name out of it.