far-lefties at The Nation question Nobel Prize going to Algore

This isn't the first time i've read Alexander Cockburn criticize the theory as Algore sees it. these are fighting words:

Already the hysteria about anthropogenic global warming stoked by Al Gore and the Big Lie gang writing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's press releases has done enormous damage to vital environmental cleanup, sidetracking attention and money from work on sewers, toxic waste sites, filthy smokestacks--not to mention the vast disaster of agricultural pollution. Two other consequences of the hysteria will be deadly. Biofuels will steal the meals of the Third World poor and put them in First World gas tanks. Nuclear power is the hysteria's prime beneficiary. As Peter Montague describes it in our current CounterPunch newsletter, "The long-awaited and much-advertised 'nuclear renaissance' actually got under way this fall." NRG Energy, a New Jersey company, applied for a license to build two nuclear power plants in Bay City, Texas--the first formal application for such a license in thirty years.

Cockburn demonstrably sees Gore's global warming/climate change histrionics as a "trojan horse" strategy on behalf of the nuclear power industry:

...As nuclear plants start to sprout like toadstools across the landscape, it is certainly appropriate to lay a large measure of the blame on Al Gore, who has been a shill for the nuclear industry ever since he came of age as a political harlot for the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory in his home state of Tennessee.

Cockburn is pretty brutal on Gore the rest of the article, especially on his hawkish past, specifically on the iraq issue, which i've previously blogged about here on NGNG...

just to change the subject for a second, i read this article early this morning when it was called "Gore and the Big Lie Gang"...they've changed the title...i wonder who got to 'em?...hmmmmm...


here's a link to a previous article for The Nation by Cockburn on climate change fearmongering: "Who are the Merchants of Fear?"

also, from today's WSJ Opinion Journal, a measured piece of skepticism providing historical context from a guy who's been studying the phenomena since 1968.