Karl Rove: ‘Climate Is Gone’
By Brad Johnson
Republican strategist Karl Rove, who helped organize the outside groups that spent millions to install Republicans in the midterm elections, spent election day celebrating with Pennsylvania’s growing drilling industry. Like other corporate sectors, the fossil industry is hoping that Republicans will be able to roll back regulations that limit their profit-seeking at the expense of people’s health and safety. Rove told the attendees of a shale-gas conference in Philadelphia that the incoming Republican House of Representatives “sure as heck” won’t pass legislation to limit greenhouse pollution from fossil fuels:
“Climate is gone,” said Rove, the keynote speaker on the opening day of a two-day shale-gas conference sponsored by Hart Energy Publishing L.L.P. And Rove told the trade show, “I don’t think you need to worry” the new Congress will consider proposed legislation to put the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing under federal rather than state regulation. The procedure, known as “fracking,” is responsible for the dramatic growth of shale-gas drilling in formations such as Pennsylvania’s vast Marcellus Shale.
Rove’s pronouncement that the “climate is gone” may be more accurate than he realizes. The Geological Society of London is warning that the planet will take 100,000 years to recover from man’s global warming pollution, the permanently warmer Arctic is altering weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere, and scientists continue to warn that global policy ambitions — if the United States even acted — are likely too weak to avoid catastrophe.
— Written Nov. 4, 2010, on Think Progress
