This video from C-Span of Ralph Nader is a surprising admission that really says it all. No matter how much whining and wailing there is about my appearance on PBS, there was one statement in that story that rings especially true, and Ralph Nader just confirmed it.
“Stanford University professor of communication and political science Jon Krosnick, who has polling on climate change for 15 years, thinks the skeptics are winning in Washington.”
Nader said today at the Environmental Policies of U.S. Presidents seminar:
They’re running away from the issue [of global warming]. They’re not even criticizing nuclear power the way some of them were.
9:36 am ET Approx. 1 hr. 3 min. Worldwatch Institute LIVE Environmental Policies of U.S. Presidents Environmentalists talked about their criteria for and the results of their ranking the environment legacies of U.S. presidents.
Here’s the higlights transcript of this shorter C-SPAN clip where Nader speaks:
| 00:00:03 | GROUP ON NANO TECHNOLOGY. |
| 00:00:06 | THIS IS AN ENORMOUS DECLINE IN CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE, KEEPING UP WITH THE CHALLENGES. |
| 00:00:10 | AND THE THIRD OUTCRY HAS GOT TO BE LOCAL, STATE, AND NATIONAL POLITICAL CANDIDATES WHO WILL RUN ON THESE ISSUES INSTEAD OF RUN AWAY FROM THESE ISSUES. |
| 00:00:22 | AND I’LL GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE THAT WILL FIT YOUR PUBLICATION. |
| 00:00:30 | WHEN THE DURBIN CONFERENCE WAS UNDER WAY, SENATOR JAMES INHOFF, WHO CALLED GLOBAL WARMING ONE OF MODERN HISTORY’S GREATEST HOAXES, SAID THAT HE’S THE ONLY ONE TALKING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING IN WASHINGTON. |
| 00:00:43 | AND SO I CALLED HIM UP AND I SAID SENATOR, YOU KNOW, THIS IS QUITE AMAZING. |
| 00:00:49 | DON’T THE DEMOCRATS TALK ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING? |
| 00:00:53 | HE SAID NO MORE. |
| 00:00:55 | I SAID WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO DEBATE A PROMINENT GLOBAL WARMING — ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING ABSOLUTELY. |
| 00:01:04 | ADVOCATE IN THE CONGRESS? |
| 00:01:06 | HOW ABOUT YESTERDAY, HE SAID? |
| 00:01:13 | SO I CALLED CONGRESSMAN ED MARKEY. |
| 00:01:16 | THIS IS A YEAR AGO. |
| 00:01:20 | I SAID CONGRESSMAN MARKEY, WOULD INHOFF? |
| 00:01:26 | YOU BE WILLING TO DEBATE SENATOR SOMEHOW THEY COULD NEVER FIND A TIME TO DEBATE IN FRONT OF THE SENATE OR HOUSE AND OF COURSE, THERE COULDN’T COMMITTEE ROOM THIS ISSUE. |
| 00:01:41 | HAVE BEEN A MORE DEFENSIVE STATEMENT BY PRESIDENT OBAMA THAN TO SAY FINALLY — HE DIDN’T MENTION IT IN TWO STATE OF THE UNION SPEECHES, CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A HOAX. |
| 00:01:54 | THAT WOULD HAVE MADE TEDDY ROOSEVELT PROUD AND JIMMY CARTER AND SO FORTH. |
| 00:02:02 | SO YOU DON’T HAVE A POLITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE ON CAPITOL HILL AND IN MANY STATE LEGISLATURES. |
| 00:02:10 | ISSUE. |
| 00:02:10 | THEY’RE RUNNING AWAY FROM THE THEY’RE RUNNING AWAY FROM THE ISSUE. |
| 00:02:15 | THEY’RE NOT EVEN CRITICIZING NUCLEAR POWER THE WAY SOME OF THEM WERE. |
| 00:02:19 | THEY’RE CUTTING QUID PRO QUO |
With some due respect to his interest in public exposure, Mr. Nader has become an old man that is entirely insignificant, as opposed to simply a totally insignificant man, which he has been for many years.
Your followers, Ralph, are fewer these days….far fewer, and much, much younger than you. Perhaps you should consider actually moving forward in life.
Admit it Ralph….AGW is ‘unsafe at any speed’…..
Lifted my spirits, even though this is clearly an attempt to rally the troops. Thank you for posting this Anthony!! Markey ostriched LOL!!
Wow – those “higlights” look like they were transcribed by a voice to lossy text converter! Playing the clip made a lot more sense. E.g. “HE SAID NO MORE” should be “He said, ‘No more.'”
I was just thinking a few days ago that I hadn’t heard anything from Ralph Nader in ages. If he’s around just in CSpan clips, I guess he’ll be keeping out of trouble.
The Corvair is dead, but the Volt lives.
Enter the man who single handedly closed down a production plant for a frivolous if not fraudulent campaign, upon which he has made millions of dollars, safely tucked away. And turned the Corvair into a collectors item.
I’m glad the Volt doesnt run on LiPo’s, otherways Nader would have another cause. When you try to pack more and more energy into a smaller and smaller volume, you are, basically, building a potential bomb.
Luckily nature itself has found a very stable way of storing energy in a small volume.
It is called…….oil.
There was nothing wrong with the Corvair except Nader, the man who didn’t understand the difference between understeer, oversteer and his own backside. A very sad episode which proved the power of alarmist hysteria over good engineering.
As a result, Americans missed out on a lovely and logical American-built car which could have taken American drivers away from the-then current palaces on wheels, mad excesses of sheetmetal and chrome.
@Patrick Guinness says:
September 18, 2012 at 9:56 pm
And the Corvair was a pretty good,safe car. I drove two of them [not at the same time, of course] and never had any problems. The main problem, as I see it, was that American drivers were typically not used to driving a rear engine transaxle auto with a tendency to oversteer in a hard cornering situation, …much like the Volkswagen Bug of the same era – which never seemd to bother Nader. One supposes he just had it in for General Motors.
Ralph Nader is a nut. But, he’s an observant nut. We’ve won. We won last year. But, it was only on this subject. They want water to be the next issue. Continue to ridicule the thought of virtual water. They’d like the ozone to fall back on, but they’re too scared to run it up again. (Thanks to all of the climate skeptics!)
Slowly, but surely, this gets to become what it was always about, a philosophical/social/economic issue. Only the most ardent true believers think something really bad is on the horizon and that man couldn’t adapt any changes we have moving forward. (heh).
Don’t despair, there will continue to be challenges to rise against with these lunatics!
This would ofcourse be typical, especially from Democrats, where once they were thrilled to be able to waste billions of dollars on more useless “Green House Gases” schemes which all came to nought and had zero or negative affect. Even the electric cars were a debacle as it takes, uses and generated more pollution that a normal vehicle ever did. Now we have the joke that is the Biofuel cycle which has now been demonstrated to be more toxic than standard fuel. Someone should inform those people about ’cause and effect” as it would appear that they do not comprehend the concept or ever bother checking the facts before they start another one of their hair brain schemes. It really is laughable.
Look at the guy; Ralph Nader. He looks worse than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Global warming is just as decayed scientifically as Ralph Nader is physically. The two are emblematic of each other in a macabre sort of way. A spent leftist who should have left the stage a long time ago endorsing a spent and discredited scientific theory that should have left the stage with him. No body cares about Ralph today and no body cares about global warming today; the world has moved on to other, more important things.
James Sexton said:
September 18, 2012 at 10:36 pm
Ralph Nader is a nut. But, he’s an observant nut. We’ve won.
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It’s no time to get cocky – we haven’t won – when the powers that be aren’t speaking openly about something, it just means that they have gone covert.
They are waiting until after the election: if obama wins, then the environmental issues that seem to have gone dormant will resurface with a vengeance, and the jackbooted greenshirts will be kicking down our doors some krystallnacht soon, looking for skeptics.
18 Sept: KSN-TV: Hutchinson plant to lay off half its workforce
Siemens Energy makes wind turbines for the wind energy industry. It says it is restructuring its wind power business and it will affect approximately 615 employees primarily in Iowa, Kansas and Florida…
Siemens says there has been a significant drop in new wind power orders.
It says it’s partly due to uncertainty surrounding the future of the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for new wind turbine installations.
The company says that and the economy are casting a shadow on the short-term future of the entire U.S wind power industry…
http://www.ksn.com/mostpopular/story/Hutchinson-plant-to-lay-off-half-its-workforce/wPZ6fKyAdke62k5Q09BDhA.cspx
18 Sept: Times Union: AP: Switch to solar in Southwest limited by issues of logistics
Resource remains largely untapped because of distribution problemshttp://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Switch-to-solar-in-Southwest-limited-by-issues-of-3875583.php
F. Ross says:
September 18, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Nader did have a go at the VW, which seems to have largely “disappeared” from the net. Road and Track went through the report and the cited literature, highlighted the doctoring of it, and concluded that the VW could be considered one of the safest. This was around 1973-74
If only in modern time, what is bigger then …?
Mark and two Cats says:
September 18, 2012 at 11:48 pm
I hate to say that I agree, Mark, but I do. Public display of this line of propaganda is unpopular with all but the greenest of greenies, so yep, the greenshirts have gone to ground.
[snip . . OT . . mod]
Mark and two Cats says:
September 18, 2012 at 11:48 pm
It’s no time to get cocky – we haven’t won – when the powers that be aren’t speaking openly about something, it just means that they have gone covert.
Exactly right. The ONLY reason they have gone silent is because the public is fatigued by talk of global warming. Any more pro-CAGW talk is likely to lose votes rather than gain them. They are playing the game of “Everyone knows CAGW is real, so we’ll just continue enacting our policies and making our treaties under the radar”. And if anybody happens to notice and make a fuss, they’ll just appeal to authority and use all their usual tricks to sweep it back under the carpet. This applies to both sides of the political spectrum, and not just to the US either.
Marginalized enviro’s DO have a presidential candidate to turn to: Green Party candidate Jill Stein…
http://www.jillstein.org/
I encourage all followers of Think Progress and SkS to vote for her. Heh.
For Nader AGW politics is just a vehicke for all the income redistribution or limitation he was when he ran in 2000.
Chevy Corvair – Unsafe at any speed
Chevy Volt – Unmarketable at any price
Nader and is ilk have become “The Establishment”. The Greens, the economic central planners, the CAGW warmistas, these people are this generation’s aging, creaky, nonsense-muttering Establishment. People don’t spontaneously protest FOR the powerful and the elite. By definition the powerful can take care of themselves, and there is long list of well-funded pro-Establishment NGO and other organizations (Greenpeace, WWF, etc.) to take care of business for them when the Establishment’s news media (NYT, ABCNBCCBSPBS et al) needs assistance.
Nader says, “The third outcry has got to be….”
…what its got to be is “spontaneous”, not directed by some Establishment comandante. If an outcry isn’t spontaneous, it isn’t genuine, its astro-turfed.
@James Baldwin Sexton, completely agree, read the Democratic Platform, its just as far out there as it ever has been on AGW. This is being low profiled for the election to keep it out of the debate.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/128272082/Dem-Platform
There are many levels of argument going on.
In pure science, I think the question is settled and the skeptics have won. There is no credible scientific paper produced recently which supports the concept of CO2 driving a dangerous level of heating around the world.
There are still what I would class as ‘scientific activists’. Lewandowsky is an example, and his ‘survey’ is a good example of the depths they have to sink to to produce anything which they can claim as supportive. The battle is nearly won here.
Then there are the straight ‘green activists’, such as Greenpeace. They will continue to produce biased documents claiming that global warming exists, and publish them in their own magazines. The battle will be won here when they cease to receive any support for doing so, and I see some encouraging signs that that is starting to happen.
Finally there are the politicians and commercial green interests. These groups are strongly for the green agenda because they are obtaining money and power from it. Here I see signs that they are wavering, but remain strongly attached to the scam, because they have based their political or commercial careers on the ’cause’. They are getting exposed as the science falls away, but can still rely on the green activists to provide them with justification. What is needed here is a face-saving other line they can be presented with. Only then will they reject this obvious lie, probably in favour of an equally objectionable one….