A Profile in Selfishness

This week I was reminded why I was so fervently backing John Kerry for President. In a Washington Post article, Juliet Eilperin details how the Bush Administration is fighting off the scientists and their warnings about global warming.

State Department representatives have argued that the group, which has spent four years examining Arctic climate fluctuations, lacks the evidence to prepare detailed policy proposals.

So to grasp every loose nickel and dime for the energy industry, the Bush Administration is putting our (and their) children's inheritance at risk. There can be no other possible explanation, because we haven't seen the bar so high for evidentiary acceptability since the heyday of the tobacco industry.

And to super size their hypocrisy, the Administration claims that it opposes cutting carbon emissions "because it will cost jobs." Now the outsourcing apologists are "worrying" about jobs.

And of course this is another issue where Bush is way out of step with the rest of the world and doesn't seem to give a rat's ass.

Some council participants have begun to grumble about U.S. resistance to articulating a global climate policy. One European negotiator said the administration is trying to "sidetrack the whole process so it is not confronted with the question, 'Do you believe in climate change, or don't you?' " He added that while the other member nations will try to press the United States on the matter in the final talks, "I cannot see any solution to this unless [the administration] clearly changes its position."

And there's not a snowball in the arctic's chance of the Administration changing their attitudes about this issue as long as the energy industry is heavily funding Republican campaigns, as long as the top echelon of the Administration are energy industry veterans and likely returnees and as long as the American public is transfixed by gay marriage and school prayer and seemingly blind to the substantive issues facing the country.

I guess what bothers me most about this craven conduct is that it reflects such a sense of total self-absorption, such a reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Just to help their sponsors make their quarterly numbers, the Bush Administration is willing to fight tooth and nail against supplying any legitimacy to the relentless onslaught of global warming.

The English language simply lacks the ability to describe behavior that despicable.