When politicians pretend to be scientists

"A bitter GOP-led hearing on EPA's climate regs highlights an intractable ideological division over whether CO2 rules will create jobs and prosperity."

This is the header of a new and telling Reuters story on the seemingly never ending conflict between the economy and the ecology. The two aren’t always mutually exclusive, but when they are, it sells papers.

Reuters seems to have done a fairly nuanced job in telling this tale of misplaced anger by Republicans at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is countered by the Democrats refusal to acknowledge original sin. An objective reading of the story will show that neither side comes out looking good.

After all, the science of climate change is just that—science—and as such should be given the attention it’s due, and no more.

I’ll have more on this in the future (when I'm not completing a thesis). But for now, read the Reuters story and see where you can spot both ideological extremes acting like children. (And to think, we pay these people’s salaries to make decisions for the common good!)

Here, let’s give the last word to the Holy Father. This from his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.