As noted in the second item from this October 2007 Message column, longtime Denver Post columnist Diane Carman left the paper in order to take a position as communications director with the Presidential Climate Action Project, associated with the University of Colorado Denver's School of Public Affairs. The Project's mission was non-partisan in nature, she explained: "It's a group of scientists and people involved in public policy. They'll be working with candidates in both parties to help them develop a rational policy in regard to global warming and climate change."
Don't know how their efforts went -- but if today's blistering Carman op-ed is any indication, that whole non-partisan approach may be undergoing some rethinking.
In "GOP's 'Appetite for Destruction,'" published in the Rocky Mountain News rather than her old paper, Carman, a longtime left leaner as a columnist, goes after Republicans from the jump. Here's how her salvo begins:
The irony was almost creepy. Thousands of Republicans were gleefully chanting "Drill, baby, drill" inside a convention hall in St. Paul, Minn., some 43 years nearly to the day after the infamous Watts riots when the original chant, "Burn, baby, burn" was coined by mobs determined to incinerate Los Angeles in a fit of rage.The delegates' apparent appetite for destruction is similarly insatiable, only unlike the burning of city buildings in 1965, the damage from rampant oil drilling and continued runaway consumption of fossil fuels now would be permanent.
From there, Carman points out that in Alaska, home state of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, glaciers are receding at nearly double the rate that they did during the last decade. And she suggests that Republican nominee John McCain's call for carbon emissions to be cut to a level 60 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050 will be "impossible with an energy policy based on continued reliance on fossil fuels."
If the Democrats are guilty of similar hypocrisy, Carman doesn't mention it in her piece, which identifies her using the Presidential Climate Action Project position. Guess she feels the Dems have been listening to the scientists she speaks for a little more closely than has the Republican crowd. -- Michael Roberts
