Secretary Babbitt may have legitimate disagreements with the Clinton Administration's opponents in the global warming debate, but to call those opponents 'un-American' for daring to disagree with him and accusing them of engaging in a conspiracy and suborning scientists is completely unacceptable. Secretary Babbitt should be ashamed and should apologize before a national audience. Arguments are won or lost by facts, not slander. Secretary Babbitt's comments were delivered on the Diane Rehm Show, broadcast on WAMU-FM in Washington, D. C. on July 21.
Climate change is underway.
We have already changed the atmosphere through fossil fuel emissions. That's a scientific fact beyond denial. The effects are starting to show up. And there's going to be a treaty negotiation in Kyoto, in Japan, at the end of this year to try to set national plans to control global warming. But it's an unhappy fact that the oil companies and the coal companies in the United States have joined in a conspiracy to hire pseudo-scientists to deny the facts, and then begin raising political arguments that are essentially fraudulent, that we can do this without damaging the economy, the same kind of arguments they used against acid rain, they used against the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.