Sebastian Mallaby of The Washington Post has written a column today on Al Gore’s new movie about global warming. It says in part:
“Republican dishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming. Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth’s temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don’t know everything isn’t a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace — and that these changes are driven at least partly by fossil-fuel consumption. The U.S. National Academies have confirmed this; their foreign counterparts have confirmed this; and so has the world’s top authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . None of this is controversial.
“Except among Republicans. Candidate Bush acknowledged that climate change was a problem; once elected he denied it; then he denied the denial but refused to let his administration do anything about climate. Lately he has talked about ridding the nation of its oil addiction, but that’s because oil finances Arab extremism. Bush has been silent on the link between oil and global warming.”
I mention this not because I am a crusading environmentalist. (It is on my list, but not on the first page.) But because it gives me a chance to point out something that won’t be news to people who have read our series “Following the money: Donors and activists on the Anglican right.” One of the major financial backers of the disinformation campaign on global warming is Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., a major backer of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the American Anglican Council and various British groups working to expel the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion for ordaining an openly gay bishop and allow its priests to bless same-sex relationships.