Tea Party has Climate Bill in its crosshairs

November 10, 2009 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 4.02.45 PMTo say that Republicans are opposed to the Kerry-Boxer climate bill pending in the Senate would be an understatement. Not only did conservative members of the Environment and Public Works committee boycott the vote on the bill last week, their minority leader, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has sworn to undercut president Barack Obama’s pro-carbon-trading efforts at the U.N.’s climate talks in Copenhagen next month.

Now, the more extreme wing of the party is getting into the act, with the so called “tea partiers” who rained fire and brimstone on the Democrats’ health care reform efforts this summer turning their attention to the climate package — a trend spotted recently by Mother Jones magazine.

The same people who coined and flogged the phrase “death panels” and championed Obama’s congressional hecklers (Rep. Joe Wilson, we’re looking at you), are turning their considerable wrath against the bill, which (very roughly) would establish a carbon cap-and-trade system in the U.S., limit greenhouse gas emissions and set quotas for renewable energy generation.

A new viral video, titled “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” billed as a rebuttal to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth,” is making the rounds on the internet, circulated by conservative organizations like Focus on the Family, the Heritage Foundation and others. Calling itself a warning against “global warming hysteria,” the film paints climate bill supporters as extremists who are actively shutting down businesses and laying off workers in the name of environmental protection. Here’s a taste:

In addition to pulling at viewers’ purse strings, it taps several other patently tea-party tactics: Portraying environmentalism as a Hollywood, liberal, radical scheme — even trotting out electric-car enthusiast Ed Begley Jr. and GreenPeace; oddly, it chooses DDT as an example of the eco-elite (a caste defined by Gore) manipulating science to serve their ends. Apparently the World Health Organization lifted its ban on DDT, but remains blacklisted. And of course it caps it all off by inspiring disbelief in the very notion that global warming exists.

The next step for “Not Evil, Just Wrong” and its cohort is to encourage local tea party screenings. On the movie’s web site, you can buy a “Platinum Party Pack” that includes screen initations, t-shirts, posters, a small red carpet and a copy of the film for only $99.95. The group behind it claims that 400,000 viewers tuned into the online debut. But now that the initial fervor is over, they might have to turn to new strategies and slogans.

In the meantime, the Climate Bill itself is continuing its journey through the Senate, now with the full weight of the Obama administration behind it. But it’s not all smooth sailing. Moderate opponent Max Baucus (D-Mont.) threw up what could be a major roadblock today, calling for stringent trade protections so that climate measures won’t hurt domestic business.

One thing has become clear — whether it’s in a rightist movie or a moderate Democrat’s objection — when it comes to the Climate Bill: it’s the economy, stupid.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

With GreenBeat 2009, VentureBeat's all-star conference on all things Smart Grid, coming up in November, Camille will be expanding coverage of this exciting space. Stay up to date by following @greenbeat2009 on Twitter or by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook here.

  • steve
    That's disturbing(movie). I guess I've never really understood how people can have such a negative viewpoint about steps to improve the damage we are doing to the environment. Even if you don't believe that global warming is happening, the mere absence of pollution from these "dirty" power plants and automobiles should be enough to persuade you. Whenever I get into a debate about this subject, it always surprises (or doesn't) me that the opposing view can only deny the climate change scientific suggestions, but never see the various benefits of sustainable or renewable energy (cleaner air, unlimited supply, more but different local jobs, etc.)
  • MasterTeacher
    The global corporate sponsors (can you say Rockefeller big oil?) that are sponsoring your movement are constantly admitting that this is not about keeping the environment clean but about controlling people. They have told us repeatedly that this is a scam. Why are you dumb enough not to listen to them? Why are you working for these corporate slave masters? Al Gore is one of them, making so much money off this. He's a sick fraud.

    On manipulating America with environmental issues:

    "The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. ...The real enemy then is humanity itself. Democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead.”

    -- Richard Haass, Club of Rome Document, 1991, “The First Global Revolution” p. 71,75 1993

    These people are sick EXTREME totalitarians. And your extremism is helping them get more and more control over us. Goodbye freedom. There'll be no smart grids in my home!
  • Frank
    "Now, the more extreme wing of the party is getting into the act, with the so called “tea partiers”"

    Wow! Is Venturebeat just another political blog?

    Have you ever been to one of these tea party meetings? I have once, and they look like your aunt and uncle + some university students. These are not party politician. These are people from all walks of life who are fed up with big government - a government that grew tremendously under Bush and now even faster under Obama.

    Tell me one thing. Cap and Trade, even if we implement and mange to limit CO2 emissions - the scientist's models still says it will not make a dent in global warming. Then why should we punish our small businesses while China will ignore all of this?

    Is this another political move to export more of our jobs?
  • Nick67
    Ocean Acidification.
    Permafrost Methane.
    Muslim Oil Dependency.
    Coal Ash.
    Mercury Emmissions from Coal Burning.

    Duh. Google any of them. Any one of them make cap-and-trade worth doing.
  • Geoff H
    Laws dont stop reality from happening.
  • btok
    For those of us skeptics Climategate
    and deniers it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. The truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.
    The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for emitting greenhouse gases.
    Energy is called the master resource because if you have lots of it you can call your own shots. If you don’t you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential. For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.
    So around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.
    It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling “climategate.”The weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity!The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disband in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster.
    Read full article:http://www.infowars.com/global-warming-meltdown-climategate/