I started this blog in February 2007, and many of my initial posts centered around the mountains of evidence emerging that the whole Global Warming/Climate Change movement was a complete fraud. In fact, the talk of March 2007 around the ‘net was UK Channel 4’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” documentary, which exposed the faulty science behind the political watermelon movement. There was an attempt in 2006 to start a “Crunchy Con” movement, but that was a non-starter that fooled no one.
Fast-forward to May 2011, and we have a character named Tim Pawlenty, pretending to be the small-c conservative standard bearer for the Republicans in the 2012 Presidential Election campaign. Yet where was he in April 2007, when we already knew that the Global Warming emperor had no clothes? He was addressing the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) in Minneapolis, with this brief speech. Here is the full text of his remarks to the organization, found also in the .pdf minutes of the MCCAG found here.
Thank you everyone. You’re all busy and you’ve taken time to help us form a better environmental program for the state.
As Peter Drucker taught us, “The practices that got us here, won’t get us to the future. The best way to think about future is to go out and invent it.”
It looks like we should have listened to President Carter. He called us to action, and we should have listened. So we now have ourselves in a bit of a pickle. As is often the case, the people are way ahead of the politicians. We’re benefiting from their tailwind.
Other visionaries deserve credit too, many who may have been dismissed as goofy. They were right, not goofy. Energy and climate issues are intertwined. Climate change is real. Human behavior is partly and may be a lot responsible. Those who don’t think so are simply not right. We should not spend time on voices that say it’s not real. Please don’t let these voices discourage or distract you from your mission.
Our hope is at the end of your deliberations, you will have given us a plan for action. I’m proud of Minnesota’s longstanding attention to environmental issues, but here we need to raise the bar as others catch up. We want to be bold, dynamic. But we have to fashion steps. Our actions on climate can’t unravel the political consensus or the Minnesota economy. It must be done in a rational way.
Sometimes success has led to complacency. Sadly we have been complacent in thinking about energy and environment. But we’re reaching a tipping point, and we have to deal with it now. I’ll do my best to lead and advocate for your recommendations.
In summary: ‘Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech was right-on. Listen to the visionaries like him and Al Gore, and ignore those deniers who stand in the way of big-government solutions to climate change. I believe the climate is at a tipping-point, and I’ll act as governor to do whatever you zealots recommend.’
T-Paw has tried to distance himself from enviro-pimping ways of the past. But his “mistake” wasn’t in, say, 1997, when he could have claimed to not have known any better. This was 2007, when the debunking was publicly available, and the red agenda of the green movement was well known. He was already Governor of a state, and was actively encouraging the greens to provide him a plan to implement! Later in 2007, he actually signed a state bill requiring a Minnesota task force to come up with recommendations on how to implement a cap-and-trade system. There’s no way to write this one off as a youthful indiscretion.
So the question is: Is Tim Pawlenty a naive fool, or another two-faced RINO? Either way: I cannot take his candidacy seriously. If you were pushing that stuff just four years ago, you have no business pretending to be a conservative.
Flaggman's Canada 