Nothing To Offer

by digby

One of the things I find most interesting about the global warming debate is that the libertarian view of how to run the world is completely inadequate in the face of such a thing. Not that it stops them from trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, of course.

Last week the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” unveiled a couple of hilarious ads about global warming in which they literally extoll the virtues of carbon monoxide as “life.” But how else can a group that sells itself like this come to grips with a global, environmental problem:

We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.

That sounds awfully clever until you start talking about global warming, doesn’t it? Both Paris Hilton and I are in the same boat when it comes to being able to breathe on this planet. “Choices” in a free marketplace are beside the point when the very ground we walk on, the very air we breath, the very world in which all of us, rich and poor, live is under threat. Dealing with global warming is the ultimate example of the common good and it’s the most powerful issue upon which the right’s edifice of free market individualism crumbles into irrelevance.

Global warming is a mutual, planetary challenge and the conservatives and wingnut libertarians who see money as freedom can do nothing but put their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening. The only question is whether it will kill their bankrupt ideology before their bankrupt ideology kills the planet.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is coming to your town. Go see it. This is one where we are all, literally, in this thing together.

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