An alternative approach to the contraception coverage issue

I don't have an ethical problem with Romneycare's support for mandating birth control coverage by religiously-run institutions doing secular activities like running hospitals, with similar provisions in many states, or with similar provisions in Obamacare.

Another way to handle this issue though is to require the same total level of financial commitment from religious employers and then let them choose something additional to cover, to make up for their decision not to cover contraception.  Their hospital employees can get breaks on plastic surgery, while other hospitals' employees get contraceptive coverage.  No financial reward accrues to a religiously-based resistance to coverage, and secular employees can keep the coverage differential in mind when deciding which jobs to apply to.

This could be done even more broadly:  rather than every insurance provider being required to cover the same standardized basket of services, just figure out how much that basket would cost for your average provider, and tell other providers that they can choose a different basket so long as that different basket, if paid for by the average provider, cost at least as much as the standardized basket.  If they can then figure out a way to do things differently and cheaper, then more power to them.

I doubt these solutions are allowable currently, but maybe that could change someday.  I generally prefer determining the fair cost approach for someone who wants to deviate from a standard, like requiring lifelong coma/quadraplegia insurance for motorcycle riders who don't want to wear helmets, rather than simply telling them what they can or can't do.


UPDATE:  Apparently I should clarify.  I was comparing replacement of contraceptive coverage with something trivial like plastic surgery not in order to indicate that contraceptive coverage is trivial, but that employers IMO are unnecessarily and significantly reducing the value they provide to employees if they really want to follow this unwise path.

UPDATE 2:  Just like I don't have a problem with the original proposal, I don't have a problem with the new one.  The cost issue is less than entirely clear to me - if it's really the case that it saves insurers money, then that's fine, but if the coverage costs money on net, then there's the question of who pays for it.  And the Catholic Bishops want to exempt not just the religious charities but any business run by Catholics from the same obligations as other business, which is a real race to the bottom if the exemption saves them money.  And there's self-insured Catholic charities, but they're getting ever further afield from religious service and being more like any other business entity in that case.  I still think the best approach would be to develop a basic cost basket, and a clear, mandatory disclosure of when the insurer deviates to add and subtract from the standardized basket.

What the heck, UPDATE 3:  my classmate Laura MacCleery battles it out on Fox News.

One of these things not like the other?

The ad that so offended Karl Rove:


The ad that didn't (AFAIK):

I have a hard time seeing the difference, except that Rove is sorry that things worked out well in Detroit.

Incidentally, that second ad is kick-ass. That's the kind of thing that the green side of the equation needs.


FN.  Clean coal is a misnomer if it includes mountaintop removal or excludes carbon sequestration.  I'm not yet prepared to say it's always a misnomer, though.

Energy-disaster conversions by Arthur Smith

I don't have much value to add, just go read him convert between energy scales between earthquakes, nuclear bombs, power plants, and the sun.  What interests me is how large human energy uses are, that a 1 GW power plant produces more energy in a year than is released in fifteen Magnitude 7 earthquakes.

In the end, the sun wins.  Go solar!

Romney's Kinsley Gaffe, in context

I'll leave 'poor' Mitt Romney alone for a while after this, but I wanted to highlight Chait's identification of Romney's statement that he's "not concerned with the very poor" as a Kinsley Gaffe, where a politician makes the mistake of saying something that the politician actually believes.

Romney has deliberately lied about Obama, changing Obama's statement about the McCain campaign by removing the context in order to claim it was Obama's statement about himself.  Adding context to Romney's statement doesn't help him much though - he's not concerned because the poor have a safety net, and he even generously offers to fix any holes "if" any exist.  What this indicates is his true belief that there were no holes in the safety net before the Great Recession, and that nothing the Republicans have done or plan to do will create more holes.  He further believes that the very poor don't work, or apparently don't even want to work, so they're unaffected by increased unemployment and depressed wages.

Republicans with responsibilities at local and state levels are often a little more realistic than this (I know some of them), so that a former governor can actually believe this is pretty depressing.  Massachusetts is a prosperous state, so Romney didn't have to focus on the poor in quite the same way as elsewhere, but that's not a good enough reason.

Chait's one mistake is creating a distance between Romney and his campaign.  Whatever Romney "really" believes eliminate [EDIT:  should've said "does not eliminate"] his primary responsibility for his campaign.  And his Kinsley Gaffe tells us about Romney himself.


UPDATE:  Romney backpedals and acknowledges the safety net has holes, throwing under the bus those people who backed him with statements that the poor have more than enough safety nets.  Given that he's been running for president for over six years now, I'd expect him to be able to identify at least one of those holes and what he'd do to fix it.  Since he hasn't, we can weigh his promise to identify and fix the holes with an appropriate level of credulity. 

Journalists, ask whether a President Romney will resign if Iran gets a nuclear weapon on his watch

In case the video goes away, Romney warns “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will get a nuclear weapon,” he said. “If we elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not.” We need some way to rein in the blatantly untrue claims like this one, and demanding promises for consequences may be one way to do that.

After having run for office myself, I still can't get over how much worse the quality of rhetoric and campaigning is at the state and national level.  On my campaign website I described what I supported but said "I will be just one of seven Board members, so making [my issues] happen will need some help, but public support and public involvement can help push through changes...."  I believe it would've cost me politically if I made promises I couldn't guarantee, like Romney's doing.  Journalists ought to hold him accountable, or at least get a flustered response out of him.
----------------
Just to imitate the journalistic practice of false balance, here's a nice thing to say about a former Republican candidate, Rick Perry:  he was right about instituting Supreme Court term limits (via New Yorker with some helpful elaboration).  I've supported this before, I think a lot of my fellow lawyers would do the same, and I see no reason for Democrats not to do the same.

"Israel Firster" versus "climate denialists" versus Lindzen

An interesting article by Spencer Ackerman sounds off against the term "Israel Firster" as used by the American progressives as a label for Americans that support every Israeli policy and interest, especially the most aggressive and anti-Muslim policies.

My most left-wing views concern Israel, its shameful treatment of Palestinians, and the accurate description by Israeli politicians of that policy as "apartheid".  Still, I think I agree with Ackerman, not entirely but enough to say that the Israel Firster term should be dropped.  The key to me is that the term originates in anti-Semitism (this is my first and probably last positive reference to anything written by David Bernstein).  While the African-American community has shown how to reappropriate words with disgusting historical origins, that's not something to be done lightly.  Let this term go.

Juan Cole does a better job with the term Likud-supporter, describing the American politicians who reject as anti-Israel the positions favored by a significant strand of progressive Israeli politics.  I'm not sure that captures the thought of politicians who can't see any divergence between American and Israeli interests, but it's good enough for now.

By contrast, I've never bought the claim that "climate denialism" must not be uttered because of its similarity to "Holocaust denial".  I used climate denialism years long before it was claimed by opponents to be derived from Holocaust denial terminology.  Even if it was for some, the connection isn't nearly as seamless as the term "Israeli Firster" is with anti-Semitism.  These people truly are climate denialists and it has a connection to being anti-science, not to anti-Semitism.

And since we're on a related subject, there's the issue of Richard Lindzen claiming to be offended by the term climate denier because he claims to be a Holocaust survivor.  His claim is based on the fact that his Jewish parents emigrated from Germany in 1938, and he was born in 1940.  Even the broadest-accepted definition of Holocaust survivor would only include his parents, not him (and many would not include his parents, although they undoubtedly faced severe persecution).  Actual Holocaust survivors would have good reason to be offended by Lindzen.

Another denialist victory - 2008 isn't the warmest La Nina year on record

I think that's the way they'll spin it.  At the end of 2008 I wrote that year would be the warmest La Nina year in the historical record, but new data forces me to retract that erroneous statement.


PS. That's what I get for sitting on a blog post that I've been meaning to write - those jerks at Capitol Weather Gang beat me to it.  I await the denialist explanation on how we can have years this warm when a natural cycle is temporarily cooling a significant percentage of the earth's surface.

South Carolina sez Rick Santorum is too moderate

Dave Weigel (no liberal) at Slate:

Rick Santorum is the lone "compassionate conservative" in the race, the only one who talks about protectionist trade, rebuilding manufacturing, and income inequality. (Yes, yes -- , his as Yglesias points out, his tax plan is still regressive. But we're grading on a curve.) He utterly failed to convince conservatives that he -- a happily married father of seven with a serious record of wins in Congress -- was the right anti-Romney. It's not a fair fight, and I'm sure Santorum could win over most Gingrich voters in a lab experiment, but you have to consider why Santorum's specific brand of populism falters as Gingrich's big-picture, Glenn Beck-ian anger thrives. Gingrich and Ron Paul are the most apocalyptic candidates, insistent that America is run by socialists who risk destroying everything. Santorum won't go that far. At a Chamber of Commerce event I wrote about this week, Santorum was the only one of three candidates (Gingrich and Perry were the others) who argued that the National Labor Relations Board might be fixed, not defunded and destroyed. Not good enough!

This is the context in which we're fighting for climate realism within the Republican Party.

"Let's return to this February, 2013 and see if 'victory' still smells as sweet". Why wait?

The above is the political prediction of a political scientist that delaying the Keystone XL decision was Obama's brilliant way of playing his supporters for fools until the next election.

Or maybe not (although who knows for sure, but it's no help to the project).  Now the fight may also switch to Canada deciding whether to build their own pipeline to export the oil overseas, instead of piping it to Louisiana to be sent overseas.  It's a long game.

(Edited for a tad more context.)

Whaling cap and trade has the politics of carbon taxes

The politics is that I don't see it happening, or at least not as the primary tool for managing the problem, regardless of the merits.

Unfortunately the paywall means I can't RTFA in Nature, but here's the Washpost and an interesting take by Holly Doremus.  A pure cap/trade, which they're not proposing, would require whaling nations to buy whaling allocations they now steal from the world's common heritage for free, so politics rules that out.  The authors apparently propose allocating parts of the harvest for free to whaling nations, which raises the question of why anyone else would support it.

The other biological aspect of this issue that I haven't seen discussed stems from my understanding that the current harvest is likely significantly less than what some common whale species can handle.  Of course whalers currently ignore species restrictions and kill whatever whales they can find, but that gets arm-waved (and more could be done if the political will existed).  This proposal could result  in an increased allocation, making it more expensive for whaling opponents to buy out quotas.

I agree with Holly that there are non-economic problems with this proposal, although I disagree with her implication that an economic approach is incapable of addressing non-economic problems.  Just this one.

Holly also picked up on the same parallel I saw to attempts to buy slaves as a way to end slavery.  I wouldn't be as dismissive as she is though.  I suspect buying slaves their freedom was an important method to reduce the number of slaves in states where it was a marginal activity, making it easier for those states to move to abolition. Pennsylvania then moved to a gradual abolition of slavery in 1780, diminishing the economic impact to slaveowners by putting it off into the future.  Economic approaches have their value.

Ending ethanol subsidies, still working on the technology

Congress' alleged aversion to subsidies hasn't had much useful results that I can tell, but there is one exception:  the end to three decades of ethanol subsidies, and the massive tariff on imported ethanol.  The environmental impact is less clear because the requirement to oxygenate gas remains, so the ethanol will still get produced - it's just that the oil industry won't be getting a $6 billion annual undeserved tax writeoff.  Still, a good step.

Another longer term possibility is using scientific research to change corn yield to emphasize ethanol production, something that can change a borderline wasteful product into something useful.  We'll see, maybe it'll work.

In other news, the guys at the Breakthrough Institute apparently have a new book arguing the groundbreaking concept that science and technology can be used to solve our environmental problems.  I'm underwhelmed.  I'd be more whelmed though if instead of saying new tech solutions must include nuclear, they said that it could include nuclear, and let the performance of various solutions play themselves out.

To be fair, I haven't read it so maybe there's something interesting there.

And Matt Yglesias followed it with a post on economic bubbles

I have trouble understanding how a smart guy like Yglesias manages to keep going further down this path, but when I've said that he prefers society to always have more younger people than older people, I meant it as a somewhat joking criticism.

The joke's on me, because he's pretty literal about it now as a path for growth:

 [If immigration and lax land use regulation prime a state for population growth] then you don't need any particularly optimistic beliefs to see that the state is primed for certain kinds of investment. We're going to need new houses for these new people in the short-run, and we'll need new schools & hospitals, new car dealerships, and new highways for them in the medium run. So we're investing. And with that investment happening we need new Whataburger franchises and new H-E-Bs and probably new power plants as well. And now suddenly we're on the high equilibrium. We need more accountants and more wedding planners, we're going to need some fancy restaurants, we'll need hotels, we'll need more of everything. And since we'll need more of everything and the price of new homes will remain moderate, we'll expect the population to keep growing as people from around the country tend to move here in search of work.

As for how long that all is supposed to last, he's silent.  Ironic that the very next (not so good) post was about economic bubbles, so he acknowledges issues of unsustainability, while missing his own huge blind spot.

And yes, population growth can help economic growth, but it's unsustainable in any number of senses of the word.

Been there, didn't do that, but it was still pretty cool

We went there in 2010 and did a little bit of volunteer work with a group focusing on mountain gorilla preservation. We did the one-day hike through Bwindi thing and had what we considered an amazing encounter with a gorilla group, but not like this. I'm just impressed at the relatively calm dominance of the silverback in this video. The silverback we saw was far less tolerant, partway bluff-charging our guides when they walked in a direction that he wanted to go (they bluff-waved their machetes around in response, and everybody settled down).  You're not allowed to approach the baby gorillas but they can approach you.  We had one that came within ten feet of us, and that was pretty amazing to us.

The silverback in this video is calm but not completely, like at minute 2:50 when he pulls an infant away that was intensely scrutinizing the tourist's face.  One interesting speculation is that the silverback may have thought that staring into the man's face would be somewhat threatening, as it would've been to the silverback, but it would be hard to reason all the way through that without using a theory of mind.  And the silverback's quick glance at the man as he left was interesting - somewhat cautious, a bit threatening, and I suspect maybe just as curious as the females and juveniles but constrained by social norms from showing it as openly.  Or maybe I'm just anthropomorphizing, but it all seems plausible.

Only 700 of these guys in the wild, split into two geographically-separated groups.  As we see from the population structure of one male and a number of females, the effective breeding population is far smaller.  These gorillas haven't been bred in captivity.

Here's hoping this video helps raise awareness and maybe some money to keep the species alive.

Solar power externality and LCOE

I was talking to a very knowledgeable friend about whether solar power will become cheaper than coal in the next decade, and he pointed out a problem in how solar advocates price their power.  It's well known that you can't just estimate a solar panel's value based on its peak production capability, because much of the time that panel is producing less power or none at all, doing nothing to amortize costs.

Solar advocates admit this, and use Levelized Cost of Energy calculations to divide energy actually produced by all costs involved, over time and with a discount rate. While solar's over twice as expensive as coal now, the advocates project the cost differential to continue to diminish at the rate it has in the past, and to disappear in a decade.

So my friend's problem is this doesn't distinguish peaking power costs.  He's not using the denialist line that baseload power can't include solar at all, but that you still require additional power when solar can't provide it.   That additional power is expensive, and this cost externality isn't included in LCOE calculations.

Mulling this over, I think there's an economic and a political angle to take on it.  The economic angle is that if we want to consider externalities, then let's by all means consider all externalities - coal isn't going to do so well on that basis.

The political angle isn't whether we should consider externalities, but whether we will consider the externalities and which ones.  Greenhouse gas externalities will not be fully priced in for decades, especially for costs imposed on areas outside of the country where the gases are produced (why should we care about those effects?), but they will start to weigh in, a bit, on costs.  The brand new mercury rule shows some of the other externalities of fossil fuels will start getting price tags as well.  Overall, I think the political process will catch up more quickly on fossil fuel externalities, if still very inadequately, than on on LCOE pricing.

One other point my friend made that was a good one - discount rates for future costs mean few companies care about costs more than a decade ahead.  I thought new coal plant starts would be potentially affected by solar price competition, but maybe that price competition is still too far away.


UPDATE:  comments point to a good post at Romm's that discusses the various terms and state of play for solar in the US.  Ignoring environmental issues for a second to focus on economics, I think LCOE is fine for any buyer to use to determine whether solar prices out well, but the overall system has to consider other price issues as well.  The grid parity at the link works when you're buying electricity at the high retail rates, but it will take a lot longer if you're a utility that can buy wholesale.

NIH recognizes chimps can waive rights

The decision by the National Institute of Health to nearly completely eliminate invasive medical experimentation on chimps has received a medium amount of attention.  Good news, overall, except the advisory committee had no consensus on testing vaccines on chimps.  The testing could accelerate vaccine development but requires infecting chimps with potentially horrible diseases.  The lack of a consensus doesn't mean testing should go forward, but leaves a vacuum.

One intriguing development is that research can continue where chimps voluntarily subject themselves to it.  The chimps are trained to receive treats in return for allowing researchers to take blood samples, and it's up to the chimp to decide whether the research will proceed.  I suppose it's not impossible to do something similar with less intelligent animals, but it would be extremely difficult and not considered ethically important.

The other interesting development was the emphasis on testing on other animals instead of chimps - in other words, there's a moral scale and other animals rank below chimps.  These two developments inch toward the sapientist position I support - not animal rights, but rights based on intelligence.  A long way forward before we get there, though.

Glenn Greenwald is primarily responsible for the failure of progressive legislation since 2008.

The reasoning's simple:  Greenwald's part of the left, just like Obama and the Democrats who controlled the House and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for a while.  Greenwald's side failed to pass enough progressive legislation, therefore Greenwald's primarily responsible.

If you don't like this reasoning, complain to Greenwald:  he used the same reasoning to say voters will determine that Republicans are not primarily responsible for the failure to pass progressive legislation, laying responsibility instead at Obama's feet, especially with repeated reference to the 60-person Senate majority.  Greenwald does some really good work on civil liberties but mixes it in with this terrible reasoning.  Fault lies primarily with the Republicans, secondarily with the Democratic Senators (and some Representatives) who refuse to vote in defense of the middle class and for scientific reality.  Obama is not a Prime Minister.  Maybe somewhere Greenwald has laid out how he thinks Obama could've pushed legislation through, but he certainly didn't make that point when I listened to him.

That's not to say Obama is blameless - Greenwald rightly points to the HAMP mortgage modification failure as a self-inflicted wound.  On legislation though, he and we have to deal in reality.

Speaking of reality and legislation, we might want to look ahead.  A best-case scenario in 2012 elections will bring Obama back along with marginal control of the Senate and House.  I'm guessing more likely that Obama returns and we only get one of the two congressional houses, and even worse scenarios are very plausible.  The  best case scenario, in other words, still has us in worse position than 2009-2010.  Things generally get worse in mid-term elections for the majority party, and the majority party starts getting tired and often corrupt after many years in office.  

I think the best chance to pass climate legislation for another four years was the one that we had before the 2010 elections.  It really is a shame that many enviros failed to push for cap-and-trade, because as marginally, politically viable as it was, it was the best shot for years to come.  A national carbon tax was not politically meaningful and will take a lot more changes of political fundamentals before it will be.  Some enviros missed the boat last time.  We can still work together though do things on a piecemeal basis and at the state and local level instead, and gradually enforce carbon regulation through the Clean Air Act and other laws.

Obama good, Obama ungood

The good news is decision that gay rights and human rights "are one and the same" in a speech by Hillary Clinton, one that states the Obama administration will work for this concept internationally, and put some money behind it.   They also acknowledge imperfections here in American, while being studiously silent on gay marriage.

The foreign policy realists would say this will cost us internationally, just as any other human rights effort will cost us.  They'd be correct in some areas, although other places like Europe it should actually help our image and soft power.  Long run is a different story though, as history kind of arcs somewhat toward justice.

How this gets reflected in domestic politics will be interesting, because people who are somewhat conservative on gay rights domestically, say hypothetically a political science professor who supports civil unions, would fall on the far left of the spectrum of the countries with the worst discrimination.  The natural Republican reflex of opposing everything Obama does will then start looking pretty awful in the context of horrible abuses overseas. Rick Perry lost no time decrying "special rights" promotion, but the actual Republican nominee will probably lose votes while irresolutely dodging the issue.  Score one for the good guys.

The ungood side is the decision to overrule FDA's authorization of selling the Plan B contraceptive as a standard over the counter item.  Double plus ungood not because of the politics but the false claim that the science gives any reason to do this.  To the FDA's credit, they more or less stated their disagreement and weren't suppressed from doing that.  This is standard, almost, Republican-style War on Science.  Chris Mooney's book on the subject noted the Democrats were guilty too of this offense, but just not nearly to the same extent.  One strike against the Obama Administration in this regard.

I don't want to end on that note, so I'll add another piece of good news.  Younger Americans are significantly more accepting of climate science than older ones.  Now consider that even some Republicans acknowledge their antipathy to gay rights is a dying cause.  The very few scientists who don't accept climate science are also aging out (page 12) and not being replaced by anyone except lawyers, so the younger generation is being educated the right way.  I'm not sure how many demographically-challenged positions the Republicans really want to take, but maybe they should reconsider.


UPDATE:  Chris Mooney on Plan B here.  Similar grasp of the obvious.

The Water District reducing GHG emissions and California cap-and-trade

Today's Water District meeting featured an energy usage work study session.  We use a lot of energy moving water across much of the state and then treating it, about 5% of all our costs.  While we also have a policy saying we that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, our policy isn't very clear.  I pressed staff on this issue and another director, Linda Lezotte, also followed up:

(Arrgh, something won't let me post more than one video excerpt.  It's here for the December 5 2011 meeting at the 01:11:00 mark, for about 4 minutes.  Two of us seven directors say we need to do more than merely "cost-effective" efforts to reduce GHG emissions, the other five don't say anything.)

We're pretty good overall in our energy usage.  Maybe we can partner with Sonoma County to be better.
We're part of a joint powers authority for buying our power at a rate that's both cheaper and with lower carbon emissions than our local utility provides.  Our CO2 emissions are 435lbs/MWh, one-third the national average (see the first link, Attachment 4, p 17). Not the one-tenth that we need, but pretty good.

While California cap-and-trade doesn't apply directly to us, it does apply to the joint powers authority called PWRPA that we helped establish to get our power, and we may have a chance to sell carbon allowances from environmental improvements that we make:



(UPDATE:  okay, more linkrot, but it's towards the end of the discussion of Item 4.1 at the link above.)

In addition to what you can see on the video is the 3 hours that we spent in closed (confidential) session to discuss internally the negotiations with labor unions for new contracts.  Obviously I can't talk about what happened then, but the financial issues highlight how important the economics of all this is. If doing the right thing environmentally can help us out financially, we're going to do more of the right thing, especially right now when finances are so tight.

Crowd-sourced screening of abusive/misogynist comments for women bloggers

I've been reading more in the past few weeks about the type of garbage that women bloggers have to put up with, stuff I've never experienced.  A recent comparison:

 As the New Statesmanblogger David Allen Green told me: "In three years of blogging and tweeting about highly controversial political topics, I have never once had any of the gender-based abuse that, say, Cath Elliott, Penny Red or Ellie Gellard routinely receive."

One way to discourage this is for women bloggers to moderate and screen comments so the abusive ones never get printed.  This adds to the blogger's work load, though (and may not be possible at some work blogs), and more importantly, the anonymous abuser still gets away with exposing the blogger to abuse that ranges from mean-spirited to threats of rape.

The idea I'm suggesting is that for the bloggers who want to do so, they should be able to outsource comment screening to third-party volunteers who will kill the abusive comments (or alternatively, set them aside for later review by the blogger if she wants to check, or alert her if comments go beyond misogyny and make actual threats).  This would deprive the morons of their ability to directly insult the women they're targeting.  I suppose they could try and threaten us reviewers, but they wouldn't even know who we are or what our gender is, so have fun with that.

I don't think it would be too hard to crowdsource the screening:  you're reading for abuse, not trying to handle the content, so it would be a pretty quick and easy thing to do.  A confidence rating system like Ebay uses could help bloggers decide if they trust the reviewers.   We'd need some special software so comments could be redirected in this manner, but I can't imagine it would be that difficult.  An enterprising blogging platform could even attach some discrete advertising to make the project pay for itself.

Just an idea I'll thow out there.  I'd even put some effort into it if someone wanted to make it happen.

(Probably should re-emphasize that the best solution is for the particular men making the comments, to stop.  This is a second-best solution, and only for the bloggers who'd want to make use of it.)

Godfather's Pizza and Al Gore

The graph shows a partisan change in approval of Godfather's Pizza since Herman Cain declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination (context here).  Republicans like his former company a lot more now, and Democrats a lot less.

I have in the past been pretty dismissive of claims from right-leaning and other analysts that Al Gore's prominence in climate change activism has much to do with Republican denial of climate reality.  Godfather's Pizza argues in favor of those claims, though.

Obviously, opinion on cheap pizza and on the fate of our climate involve different levels of moral responsibility.  If Republicans react poorly to Gore's warnings, that reflects poorly on them and not Gore.  Still, efforts like the We Can Solve It campaign might need a lot more reinforcement:

Of course, Gingrich has backed off of his earlier interest in reality.  There's only so much you can do, if the Republican leadership is so unwilling to do much anything at all.  Maybe there are a enough younger Republican leaders, people like Chris Christie (or maybe others like Romney and McCain if Romney loses next year), to join in the leadership on the climate movement.  Otherwise it's up to the public.