When Thomas Friedman was wrong, people listened. Now that he's right, will they still?

When Thomas Friedman was supporting the War in Iraq and saying things like "Suck on this, Iraq!", he was regarded as a sage, and invited to tubthump about the war everywhere. Now that he's talking about climate change, and he's actually RIGHT for a change, will the same right-wingers who thought he was so smart listen? Or will they be too busy thinking that because we now have 16" of snow on the ground in New Jersey instead of palm trees, it means climate change doesn't exist?

When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that “it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to the Capitol with a big sign that says “Al Gore’s New Home,” you really wonder if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.

The climate-science community is not blameless. It knew it was up against formidable forces — from the oil and coal companies that finance the studies skeptical of climate change to conservatives who hate anything that will lead to more government regulations to the Chamber of Commerce that will resist any energy taxes. Therefore, climate experts can’t leave themselves vulnerable by citing non-peer-reviewed research or failing to respond to legitimate questions, some of which happened with both the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Although there remains a mountain of research from multiple institutions about the reality of climate change, the public has grown uneasy. What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense. The physicist Joseph Romm, a leading climate writer, is posting on his Web site, climateprogress.org, his own listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now.

The right-wing ridicule about climate change is yet another example of how, for Republicans, ideology trumps everything. When their vacation homes in Florida are under water, and malaria becomes common in Missouri, and category 5 hurricanes are the rule rather than the exception, do they think their snark about Al Gore is going to mean anything?

Thomas Friedman is starting to sound like one o'them lefty bloggers

And damn it, he owes us after spending the last decade extolling the virtues of outsourcing everyone else's job while his own was safe and defending George W. Bush's war.

But even so, we must give credit where it is due, and so kudos to Friedman (good Lord, did I just actually say that?) for pointing out that John McCain's bellowing about how Congress needs to get back to work on an energy plan is just so much hot air:

John McCain recently tried to underscore his seriousness about pushing through a new energy policy, with a strong focus on more drilling for oil, by telling a motorcycle convention that Congress needed to come back from vacation immediately and do something about America’s energy crisis. “Tell them to come back and get to work!” McCain bellowed.

Sorry, but I can’t let that one go by. McCain knows why.

It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

“McCain did not show up on any votes,” said Scott Sklar, president of The Stella Group, which tracks clean-technology legislation. Despite that, McCain’s campaign commercial running during the Olympics shows a bunch of spinning wind turbines — the very wind turbines that he would not cast a vote to subsidize, even though he supports big subsidies for nuclear power.

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

Last week the friend who is afraid to vote for Obama because of the e-mail smears forwarded me another gem from one of her wingnut friends. This one was about the states in the U.S. where there is oil and that we should tell the "dipsticks" in Washington to get drilling. What the e-mail didn't say was that the oil leases in these states aren't being used and that it has nothing to do with Congress; and it also didn't say that at the same time as oil companies want to drill off the coast of the U.S., they are exporting an ever-higher percentage of the oil they do find. I don't usually forward political material to her, because she has pretty much decided who she's going to believe, but on this one I had to send it along. I can't fight vestigial racism, particularly racism that is not acknowledged by those who still have it (much as they would like to believe they don't), but I can fight complete and utter horsepuckey.

Green Technology: the IT of the next generation

If you're an IT worker and you're not reading Carrie's Nation on a regular basis, you should be. Today she takes on the preposterously sunny Thomas Friedman on his insistence that there are bright vistas ahead in the job market in green technologies:

Sorry, Thomas. Anything having to do with green technology can be outsourced in about five minutes. Our "high-wage engineers and programmers" can make their innovative designs, than pass the work on to H-1B tech workers here in the US or to tech workers throughout the world for implementation or further refinements. And does Friedman really think that the nuts and bolts manufacturing of these contraptions will never be outsourced overseas? The total output of our "green collar" Americans would hardly even be measurable in our GDP statistics.

[snip]

Are we supposed to advise our students to enter into "green collar" professions the way we advised them to enter into engineering and computer sciences in 1990? In the year 2020, would we be advising these same students to re-invent themselves and retrain themselves for other professions?

...professions that will pay peanuts and discriminate against them because they are "too old" by then, no doubt.

I share Carrie's disdain for Thomas Friedman's pat view of the working world, coming as it does from someone whose job is to write a column a couple of times a week and who is in no danger of being outsourced.

Thomas Friedman is still an idiot

It galls me that there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers toiling away every day because they NEED to, because without writing they'll go mad -- and Thomas Friedman is paid a six-figure salary to write nonsense like this:

The irony of Iraq is that it’s the one place where Mr. Bush decisively chose regime change, but he then executed it so poorly, with insufficient troops, that Iraq never stood a chance. If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland. Today’s Bush troop surge in Iraq is just another mulligan — the president’s trying to do in 2007 what he should have done in 2003. In between, we’ve paid a huge price.

Does he truly believe, when he looks at the sectarian violence going on in Iraq, that more troops would have turned Iraq into Switzerland? Why on earth does anyone still take seriously anything he has to say?