I have been thinking about the issues Paul Krugman addresses all this week. Is it possible for an entire political party to continue to maintain a fantasy that serves their corporate masters in the face of over-whelming facts and personal experience? The only precedent I can think of is slavery, and it took a war to end it as a viable political position, even as it continues to exercise considerable influence! over a large part of the electorate.
Points of No Return
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate – Op-Ed Columnist – The New York Times
Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.
Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida – much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves – weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied ‘I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he confidently declared the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change false, although in a later interview he was unable to cite any sources for his skepticism.
So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.
