The Conservative Answer

RUSH: This is Paul in Burlington, Connecticut. Welcome, sir, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How can you say you’re grounded in reality when you keep denying the issue of global warming? And it seems to me that the — the answers don’t fit your politics, and you’re afraid of what the left has to say about this and their solutions, why aren’t the conservatives on board? I think is the real issue. There’s enough evidence. There’s enough people saying it is, that we can’t all be, you know, blame-America-first, freedom-hating sort of people — and I’ve listened to you long enough to know you changed your position on it [sic]. You used to deny it existed. Now you’ve come to some sort of terms. “Well, it may be happening. It may be sunspots,” and where are the conservative answers?
RUSH: Wait.
CALLER: It’s obvious it’s happening whether the hurricane was caused by it or not.
RUSH: Wait. Wait.
CALLER: Maybe it was; maybe it wasn’t.
RUSH: Wait, wait. No, no, no. It’s not obvious that it’s happening in the sense that you guys mean it. The only stipulation I’ve made is, “There may be global warming, because I’m not an idiot. There have been warming cycles of the earth and freezing cycles, ice cycles, for as long as the earth has been around. We may be in a naturally warming cycle.” Where I part ways from you is that man is causing it. There is no evidence of that, zilch, zero, nada. There’s nothing more than a 25-year shrill campaign to create subconsciously the idea in everybody’s mind that when it gets hot in July and hot in August it must be global warming; when it gets cold and a snowstorm happens in January, and happens to be a little bit more intense than it was last year, it must be global warming. Nobody can prove it. Nobody can prove that man is causing it. To me the proof that man is not causing it is there’s nothing we can do to stop it. This hurricane was said to be caused by global warming. Well, this hurricane weakened right before it hit and it had nothing to do with the ocean temperature. It had to do with some dry air that it had encountered and pushed it further east.
But the problem that I have with you guys on global warming is it’s become a political issue by which you seek to advance the liberal agenda. It’s nothing more than a platform for you. Whenever I see anything designed to advance the liberal agenda, I’m going to oppose it because I hate the liberal agenda. I disagree with it. It’s destructive; it’s damaging, and it doesn’t do anybody any good — other than if you define it by spreading misery equally as the New York Times accurately headlined today in their coverage of the hurricane. If you want to believe it, go ahead, but I’m not going to accept your premise that there is man-made global warming. And therefore what’s the conservative solution? Everything does not have a solution. Everything is not a problem. Everything that happens on earth is not a manmade problem, nor an American-made problem. If it’s hot one day and not hot the next day someplace where it’s cool, it’s not man made. It’s not our fault. And I’m not going to sit here and accept the premise that somehow we are to blame for this. And that’s what worries me the most about you liberals. Why can’t you just accept that there are powers greater than us, greater than we have that may have influence over this over which we have no control? There’s not one climactic event that we can stop, that we can alter, that we can detour. We cannot stop it raining harder; we cannot move thunderstorms; we cannot weaken hurricanes; we cannot steer them out of the way; we can’t stop snowstorms; we can’t stop drought; we can’t do diddlysquat about all this, so in my mind there’s no way we can cause it. You can’t have one without the other. If we’re causing it, then we can stop it. We can’t stop it.
And this fossil fuel business, burning fossil fuels? It’s absolutely nothing more than a theory, and there are countless scientists who disagree with it. There are countless scientists who oppose it. Why do you think we haven’t signed Kyoto? Because we still have some sanity left in this country in the scientific movement. The Kyoto Accord, if you want to know the details, the Kyoto accord claims that the Celsius temperature rise over the next hundred years will be three degrees without Kyoto. With Kyoto it will be 2.86 degrees. So we’re talking about four-tenths of a degree centigrade if we sign Kyoto. Do you know what that’s going to matter to a hill of beans? Zero, diddlysquat, and it wouldn’t have had a thing to do with stopping this hurricane or making it less intense. There are forces greater than man, Paul. There are forces far greater than man that created all of this. We do not have dominion over it all. The idea that we do is a descent into vanity that I can’t relate to. On the one hand you people on the left claim we’re no different than rats; we’re no different than any other animal that’s on earth. In fact some of you say that this would be a far better place without us. On the other hand, when we’re no different than rats, and no different than other animals — who certainly don’t do anything to cause global warming — we all of a sudden still are more powerful than they are because we can stop this, because we’re causing it?

The focus in this disaster ought to be on the destruction and the lives and the people, and the rebuilding and everything that we see on TV. But the focus with the left is on affixing blame, affixing blame that cannot be proven, cannot be established. Global warming, if the listen to Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, he’s an expert, William Gray, they’re getting tired of the question. There’s no relationship to hurricanes and global warming. It’s a natural cycle that these storms go through, and the cycles are 40 years long, and they’re irrelevant to global warming. The question that I have for people like you, Paul, is: “Why are you so gullible? Why are you such a sponge? Why are you so willing to soak up news and information that blames your country, that blames your lifestyle, that blames your species? What is it about you that wants to sit here and accept all the blame and then after you’ve accepted it transfer it to Republicans who disagree with you?” That’s what I want to know. What kind of life must you live, to have to want to sit here and accept all the blame for these things? There are countless disasters the world over. To blame America, to blame fossil fuels, when these disasters have happened throughout time. When you understand that a volcanic eruption will spew more destructive pollution into the atmosphere than all automobile pollution since the history of the invention of the car combined, you have to understand that we are pretty inconsequential when it comes to the climate system and the ecology system of this planet. We are residents. Yes, there are things that we can do, and I’m not opposed to keeping things as clean as we can — and we do a better job of that than any country in the world. We clean up our messes better than anybody in the world, and we spread that assistance and the technology that we have developed and the things that we have learned, and we have shared this with the rest of the world that has the ability to incorporate it. The idea that it all comes back to us, that it all comes back to be our fault, and it’s all Bush’s fault? Do you realize how absurd this all sounds, particularly when you say it next to the pictures we all see on TV?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I am sorry, my friends, I cannot let this go. (sniveling liberal impression) “What are you conservatives going to do to offer a solution? You keep changing your mind. You know it’s happening out there.” Let me give you the conservative answer. For those of you on the left out there and those of you who are still straddling the fence on this environmentalist wacko stuff and you may think there’s some relevance to it, the answer to the question, “What are you conservatives going to do to solve things?” let me throw this right back at you, and it goes right along with what I’ve always said about don’t accept the premise. You liberals need to show me what you’ve fixed before I’m going to rely on you to fix anything else. You complain about things is all the liberals do. You would have us destroy our economy and millions of jobs based on pseudoscience. You are driving up the cost of energy; you are driving down the supply of energy, and you are going to make it more difficult to heat homes during winter and cool homes during the summer if you succeed. You are going to drive up the cost of food and all products which are processed and transported with fuel. You are going to cause us to rely more and more on foreign countries and foreign regimes that seek to harm us but happen to control countries that are rich in oil. You are driving up costs. You are driving down supply, and then you blame others for the consequences of your policies, like George W. Bush! You don’t fix anything out there. All you do is complain and whine and moan, and your solutions to the problems would bring about total destruction and havoc, if you were given free rein.
The environmentalists make it much more difficult to survive Mother Nature, not to tame her. Mother Nature can’t be tamed! The folly of thinking that. Any time any local or state government attempts to build limited defenses against floods and the like, who runs into court? Who runs into the EPA and the interior department? Who throws up one obstacle after another? It’s the environmentalists, folks, who treat Mother Nature like god, left to be untouched. On the one hand they use the power of government to obstruct progress, and on the other hand they demand the government act when tragedy hits! It’s the same thing with military and law enforcement. They work year after year to undermine them and then when there’s a disaster, they’re the first to demand the military and law enforcement come to the rescue. Have you noticed all the Navy ships down there that have come to the rescue? If we’d listened to the left and if the left had their way there wouldn’t be any Navy ships to run to the rescue and there wouldn’t be a National Guard because they don’t think it’s anything but a bunch of draft dodgers. They don’t offer solutions. They don’t fix things. They only make things worse — and that’s why I oppose the liberal agenda.
END TRANSCRIPT