cap and trade

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Looks like George Will is at it again. This time carrying some water for James Inhofe on the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. Paul Krugman reminds Will that there was no "smoking gun" in those emails and also asks Will why he hates the free market so much with his opposition to cap and trade.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, he is also going to be dealing with health care, right now on the floor of the Senate. He announced this week to Copenhagen to deal with climate change. And it comes at a time when the politics seem to be changing a little bit in this.

Let me show our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. It shows whether people believe global warming is occurring. That number is going down. July 2008, 80 percent of the public; down to 72 percent now. And there's been a sort of a real partisanship. Look at Republicans, 74 percent believed global warming was occurring back in 2008. Now, a 20-point drop to 54 percent.

George, there has been a partinizing of this issue, and let me turn to one more complication we've had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their e-mail account and showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide information that runs counter to their theories.

WILL: It raises the question of -- we're being asked to wage trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the consensus far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as they say it is. The e-mails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing criticism, gaming the peer review process for scholarly works and all the rest. One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn't be embarrassed about that. It's a complicated business, and that's why we shouldn't be (inaudible).

KRUGMAN: All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain...

WILL: One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years...

KRUGMAN: It's not -- read -- this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don't have a start on it. There's a lot of loose use of language when you're just talking among each other. And what the deleting really meant, the deleting would be meant that, you know, we don't know when this thing started, because we don't have very good data back then. There weren't any weather stations. And that's what the context was.

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Popcorn time: Beck calls out the dogs on GOP's "Cap and Traitors"

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OK, pop some popcorn and pull up a chair. Glenn Beck is calling out the dogs … on Republicans.

He ran a special segment last night urging his audience descend en masse upon the “Cap and Traitors” – Republican House members who actually voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill last Friday – all eight of them. With him to seal the deal was the Washington Examiner's Kevin Mooney, who besides being in need of a new suit was also in need of a logic text:

Beck: Now, there are eight Republicans who voted for cap and trade. ... Look at this map that we put up. It looks like all of the votes -- there it is -- it looks like all of these votes -- and we're going to have some showers -- uh -- all of the votes really came, half of the votes, more than half -- from those areas. The West Coast and from the liberal Northeast.

Mooney: Well, Glenn, you're put your finger on it. Uh, the votes, whether they're Democrat or Republican, in favor of this bill, out of the coastal areas, the elite areas of this country, they're areas of the country where the energy prices are already high. Democrats and Republicans voted against this bill in other parts of the country where they already are using other fossil fuels and have lower energy prices.

Beck: Isn't it interesting that those are the areas that are collapsing the fastest?

Mooney and Beck, not to put too fine a point on it, are full of crap. Just by way of example, look at my own home state of Washington, whose delegation voted strongly for the bill, and is included on their list of "coastal states" whose energy prices are supposedly too high. In reality -- somewhere far distant from these guys' residence on Planet Wingnuttia -- Washington's energy prices are among some of the lowest in the nation (for instance, our electricity costs are far below the national average, since we get so much of it from hydroelectric sources. Likewise for Oregon, another "elite coastal" state. Meanwhile, some of the nation's highest electricity costs can also be found in Florida and Texas -- some of the "non-elite" states on Beck's graphic.

And Glenn? Our economy here in Washington is far from collapsing. The housing bubble didn't overinflate as much here as elsewhere -- including, say Florida and Texas. And we have Microsoft and Boeing. So we're hurting, yes -- but we'll be fine. No thanks to the right-wing ideologues like yourself who wrecked the national economy.

Phony methodology aside, it is in any event always fun to see the right savage its own -- because nearly all of the eight Republicans who voted for the bill came from vulnerable districts. Dave Reichert, from Washington's 8th District, just barely survived two tough challenges from Darcy Burner, and did so in part by selling himself as friendly to environmentalists. And indeed, he comes from a district that has never elected a Democrat, but whose growing technology-worker base is a rapidly changing demographic politically -- and particularly big on environmental issues.

So we're happy to see them get hell from the Glenn Beck wing of their party. It just reminds the large mass of swing voters in the 8th District and others like it, once again, why it's stupid to vote even for a "moderate" Republican -- because they will always be overwhelmed by the pseudo-populist Wingnuttians who dominate the GOP at all levels. Especially the pundit one.