Joe Romm has a curious post up today that begins this way:
While some confused people think we are headed to a post-partisan era, more reality-based analysts, like centrist political reporter Dana Milbank, know what nonsense that is.
Romm's "post-partisan era" link takes you to a piece he wrote several weeks ago that was critical of a bipartisan white paper that had advocated massive public investment be the cornerstone of a new energy/climate strategy, rather than carbon pricing. In floating this trial balloon, the authors of the proposal (representing three think tanks across the political spectrum) were in no way suggesting that the nation is headed to a "post-partisan era." So that's the first bit of sly disingenuousness in Romm's current post. The second involves referencing Dan Milbank's latest WaPo column to make a larger point about the emerging makeup of the Republican party, which Romm writes
is the most consequential political reality for climate and clean energy policy for the foreseeable future)...it's important to hear it from the bastion of centrist inside-the-beltway analysis.
I want to point out that Milbank, the "reality-based," wise "centrist," also wrote this column two weeks ago, in which he said that it was time for Democrats
to come up with an alternative to regulating carbon, a Plan B for climate change.
Milbank went on to discuss the "makings of a cross-ideological coalition" for geoengineering research:
At the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Samuel Thernstrom wrote this year that "ignoring geoengineering is potentially dangerous and irresponsible." At the liberal Center for American Progress, Andrew Light tells me that because "research is already starting in some parts of the world, we would be foolhardy not to be looking into it."
Conspicuously, Romm chose not to mention this bit of "inside-the-beltway" analysis.
