Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt has taken a page from the 1950's witchhunt for communists. Secretary Babbitt has invoked the spirit of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy's Senate un-American Activities hearings. Hear's the UNBELIEVABLE transcript of Secretary Babbitt on Diane Rehm's radio show:
Caller's question: ....why can't we begin to increase tax on gasoline to diminish its use and to provide a revenue to develop alternative resources...
Secretary Babbitt: Let me suggest that we have a really big opportunity coming up this year, in 1997. Climate change is underway. We have already changed the atmosphere through fossil fuel emissions. That's a scientific fact beyond denial. The effects are starting to show up. And there's going to be a treaty negotiation in Kyoto, in Japan, at the end of this year to try to set national plans to control global warming.
But it's an unhappy fact that the oil companies and the coal companies in the United States have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts, and then begin raising political arguments that are essentially fraudulent, that we can do this without damaging the economy, the same kind of arguments they used against acid rain, they used against the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. This time I think it's especially unfortunate, and I think that the energy companies need to be called to account because what they're doing is un-American in the most basic sense. They are compromising our future by misrepresenting the facts by suborning scientists onto their payrolls and attempting to mislead the American people.
Host Diane Rehm: And keeping the issue alive. I mean keeping the question as to whether climate change is actually occurring, keeping the question in people's minds [unclear] it's supposed to, assuming that there is something happening.
Secretary Babbitt: That's absolutely true. There was an article by the president of Chrysler Corporation in The Washington Post last week. It's an outrageous distortion of existing science that is reflective of what's going on in the energy industry. And I don't think it's too strong to say that it is a deliberate attempt to distort the facts and to mislead and to simply stall any kind of progress for their own short term advantage with possibly really catastrophic effects in the long run.
Rehm: Have you written a response?
Babbitt: Well, I hadn't thought about it till just now. Sort of getting sufficiently worked up about this. I just might do that.
Hey Joe.. I mean Bruce... since when is having an alternative opinion (especially a scientific one!) un-American and conspiratorial?