An Unlikely Global Warming Dissident

Laurie David, wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David, is the new face of Hollywood anti-global-warming activism. You can watch her here on Bill Mahr -- remember, this is the woman Al Gore called the most important environmental activist in America today. Does she seem drunk to you?

Laurie David rubbed me the wrong way when she came to speak at UW-Madison last fall. She held up Ted Danson as a moral exemplar, for his early support for energy-efficient cars. (Thanks, but I'll stick with Buddha.) And there was an ugly, almost evangelical cockiness in her moral absolutism. Saying that we must make sure to unplug our cell phone chargers when they're not being used, for example, struck me as just so much more fire and brimstone. We're supposed to applaud when American evangelicals start preaching the impending danger of man-made global warming. This is no surprise. Secular environmentalist dogma transposes onto religious dogma quite nicely. It's a match made in hell.

It's only a matter of time before the lid is exposed on the enforced, non-existent 'scientific consensus.' I consider it a great triumph when a democratic socialist like Alexander Cockburn writes a series of columns for The Nation magazine outlining the grave scientific problems with the global warming model. If indeed high atmospheric carbon levels follow dramatic increases in temperature, as Cockburn writes, this is a huge act of whistle-blowing. The science here makes sense, and I plan to research it and report back to all of you.

You can bet Mr. Gore and Ms. David are mad as hell at Mr. Cockburn, and for The Nation for publishing these recent columns. But good for him for spoiling their fun, at least for a little while. And good for those members of the international left who want to leave their pseudo-leftist environmentalist evangelicals behind. They've found a voice which should keep growing.

You can read the Cockburn columns here, here, and here.