\jeff{krimmel}

Both Sides of Global Warming

Howard Kurtz is a media critic at washingpost.com, and he has a column up today titled “A Blog That Made It Big”. The blog to which Mr. Kurtz refers is Huffington Post, but that’s not the part of his column that caught my attention.

At the end of his column, Mr. Kurtz laments the fact that NBC spent so much time covering the Live Earth concert on Saturday. This concert was organized by Al Gore as an attempt to further publicize the harmful effects of global warming, and Mr. Kurtz thinks it’s unfair of NBC to dedicate so much programming and generate so much revenue for a partisan political purpose. Mr. Kurtz concludes his column with this bit:

Dan Harrison, an NBC senior vice president, does not back away from the message. He calls the Gore effort “an initiative we believe in,” including parent company General Electric. “I really don’t think climate change is a political issue,” Harrison says.

Really?

“Everyone agrees it’s happening. If it’s a political issue, it’s whether the political will exists to address that change. We know we need to do something, and this is a way to heighten awareness.”

I got to thinking about this, and Mr. Kurtz is right. What about the other side of AIDS in Africa? I find it a little disconcerting that the only thing I hear is about how many people are suffering and dying and how the proper medication isn’t able to find its way to the people who need it. I want to hear the other side of this issue. Or what about the genocide in Darfur? These corporate media shills keep telling me about the brutal, utterly horrifying violence that is engulfing this whole region, and I keep hearing about the innocent people who are being annihilated in the process. I want the other side of this issue as well.

Mr. Kurtz, there is an undeniable, overwhelming scientific consensus behind the idea of global warming. It’s not like school vouchers, where we need to hear a debate from both sides about the benefits of public versus private educational systems. Just like we don’t need to explore why two plus two equals three or five, we don’t need to debate whether global warming is happening. It’s happening, and what we need to debate is what we should do about it.