Washington Times - PRUDEN: A Senate gobsmack for the Oracle

Well, if the weather changes, and most of us have seen it do that with our own eyes, why not change the language of the scam?

This manufactured crisis has cost us plenty already, hobbling oil exploration, preventing the construction of new refineries, even driving up the cost of groceries. None of these hardships touch the senators who feed so well at our expense, of course, and many of them are determined to help Al milk the public cow. The senators don't want an honest debate, either.

We must be thankful for the new hard times. Maybe we can't have Wall Street bailouts and Senate handouts at the same time. Hard times stand between us and the grim consequences of Al and his bad science.

Bruce Sterling: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.

It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely.

Environmental virtue

When global warming threatens to destroy life on this planet, as Al Gore would have us believe, rush to the intersection of North Highland and Virginia Avenue in Atlanta. That’s now a “carbon-neutral zone.” In a carbon-neutral zone, the owners of small businesses can feel environmentally virtuous and be identified as such, for fees ranging from $10 a year for a small sweet shop to $600 for a restaurant. It’s the environmental version of the good feeling you get for slipping a few coins to a panhandler.