You Can’t Address Climate Change Without A Green Lantern

Shorter Verbatim Yves Smith: “Paulson, who has long been an ardent conservationist (and in contrast to his alpha Wall Street male standing, lives modestly), made a forceful pitch for carbon taxes. The irony of this proposal is that we have a Republican showing what a right-winger Obama really is.”

I know! I will never forgive Obama for vetoing the carbon tax that the Republican House and red-state Senate Democrats rammed through Congress. It’s a complete mystery why Obama would act through EPA regulations rather than causing a carbon tax to appear, and certainly the only explanation can be that Obama considers cap-and-trade-like regulations optimal public policy.

These two sentences manage to hit almost every Green Lantern trope: conservative Republicans treated with far more charity than moderate Democrats, complete obliviousness to the realities of the American political process, policies not actually favored by any American conservatives in positions of any authority described as “conservative,” and an implicit assumption that if it’s not possible to accomplish everything then it’s preferable to do nothing. It’s a Bully Window the Overton Pulpit superfecta.