Pirate's Cove

Say, as President Neophyte Obambi and the AGW Believes in Congress rail against AGW, perhaps they should take a look outside the window

Washington has seen its share of big protests over the years, and most of them center on the White House, the Mall or the Capitol. That will change tomorrow, when the first big protest of the Obama era — and the first mass civil disobedience against global warming in this country — will take place against the not-very-scenic backdrop of the Capitol Hill Power Plant, a dirty symbol of the dirtiest business on Earth, the combustion of coal.

In that one plant — owned and operated by our senators and representatives — you can see all the filth that comes with coal. There are the particulates it spews into the air and hence the lungs of those Washington residents who enjoy breathing. There are the profits it hands to the coal industry, which is literally willing to level mountains across West Virginia and Kentucky to increase its fat margins. And most of all there is the invisible carbon dioxide it spews each day into the atmosphere, drying our forests, melting our glaciers and acidifying our oceans.

Do as I say, not as I do. But, then the story in the Washington Post gets strange

The power plant is only a symbol, of course — a lunch counter or a bus station in the fight for environmental justice. We’ll sit down at its gates for a single afternoon, but the message is much larger: It’s time to start figuring out how to shut down every coal-fired plant on the planet. Success won’t come right away because we’re up against some of the world’s richest corporations, but we have to start turning this tanker around someday, and tomorrow is that day.

This may seem like an odd time to take to the streets — after all, the new administration has done more in a month to fight global warming than all the presidents of the past 20 years. But in fact, it’s the perfect moment. For one thing, our leaders may actually listen — in the anti-science years of the Bush administration, global warming activists concentrated their work on state capitols, knowing that the federal government would never budge. Now, if we demonstrate that there’s real public pressure, we may give the Democratic Congress and the White House some room to act.

Is it just me, or does anyone else get a weird vibe with a newspaper telling people to take to the streets? Isn’t the media supposed to be the watchdogs, not the activists (OK, OK, I know, that’s a bit of wishful thinking)? Perhaps if this article had been in one of the WP’s blogs or on the editorial page, but not in a regular news column. It just goes to show how the wackadoodle AGW Believers do things. Then they get in their SUVs to go take little Johnny to soccer practice.

But it al doesn’t matter, because the World faces last chance to avoid fatal warming.