Author: Andrew Sullivan

McCain and Butters have long backed the Treaty. And Reid and Lugar seem fired up by Kyl's nihilism.

Tunku Varadarajan interviews Bjorn Lomborg about his new global warming film. Lomborg's plan to combat climate change:

It would be preferable to have a global bargain, and I actually think it is possible to get one. Fundamentally, we should be asking for governments to spend 0.2 percent of GDP on research and development into green energy. This is 50 times as much as we spend today, yet it is much less than what is typically being proposed to spend on inefficient Kyoto-style policies. Since it is so comparatively cheap, it is much more likely that we could get every nation on board (and developing countries would be paying proportionally less). But even if not everyone were on board, it would still make sense to move forward. In that sense, some countries could move ahead, fund the R&D and take us much closer to tackling global warming, without everyone participating.

I have seen the movie and highly recommend it. The only dodgy moment for me was the film's depiction of cap-and-trade as solely corruption. It is corrupt, as anyone in the EU will tell you; but the film made the point without explaining the more fundamental point that cap-and-trade – originally seen as a free market solution to CO2 – could work, but at way too high a price for very modest drops in temperature.

What's great about the movie is its focus on R&D and how innovating new energy is more important than taxing carbon. In a mostly negative review, Andrew O'Hehir whines from the left but makes no substantive critique of what Bjorn argues. Yes, some climate change denialists latch onto his work, but Lomborg is not now and never has been a climate change denialist. He's a climate change realist and wants to address the problem through new technology while focusing aid on more pressing human problems:

The power of multinational energy companies is mentioned only briefly in "Cool It," and the right-wing political renaissance across the Northern Hemisphere, which has been happy to use Lomborg's work for its own purposes, is never mentioned at all. In some perfect, imaginary Adam Smith universe, Lomborg might be right that dispassionate, rational analysis would quickly yield the best solutions for all our problems at the cheapest price. Does he really imagine that we live there?

No, but he makes the case that we can. And why shouldn't we try?

If Harry Reid allows a two-week debate on DADT, there may be 60 votes in the Senate for repeal, bypassing McCain's bitter, and incoherent obstructionism. If I were you, I'd email Reid, not Obama, to lobby for repeal. It may be the last chance we get for years, now that the virulently anti-gay Tea Party has taken over the House. You can email Reid here.

A reader writes:

As a molecular evolutionary biologist can I just send you a primal "AAAARGGGGHHHHH!!!" in response to Sarah Palin, the figure-head of a regressive, anti-intellectual, anti-science movement, using the language of Natural Selection and behavioral biology to make the case for her vague "freedom" agenda?

No?  Then I apologize.  I'll return to head-butting my lab bench until the pain in my soul stops.

As far as Palin is concerned, the pain in one's soul never stops.

Further underlying the pure obstructionism of many Senate Republicans, Max Boot joins Bob Kagan in supporting the treaty. Good for them. It is a pretty insignificant issue in the grand scheme of things, and sabotaging the reset with Russia cannot be good for the interests of the United States, especially since Russia's support has been critical in tightening the screws on the Tehran coup regime.

A reader writes:

You and Kain are too right. The conservative movement's consciousness of itself as a movement has led to some of its victories — liberals are famously disorganized compared to conservatives — but also some of its worst impulses. The "movement" paradigm calls forth a siege mentality that inevitably results in a paranoia about policing the margins of the "movement." Thus do creative thinkers get denounced as heretics.

You love to talk about "theocons," but the true theological conservatism is not religious, in the traditional sense, but this quasi-religious view that many conservatives (and certainly the movement's leaders) take of politics. I am a conservative myself, but one thing I admire about liberals is that the term DINO (Democrat In Name Only) has no real meaning.

I know that liberal Democrats have their own sacred cows, but you don't generally see left-liberal opinion leaders troubling themselves to read heterodox liberals out of the party. I understand the concept of heretics in religion, but not in politics — at least not in any healthy politics, conservative or otherwise. When critics of the GOP say that the party has turned into a "church," I agree — but as far as I can tell, the most sacrosanct dogmas defended by the hierarchy are the immaculate conception of the free market, low taxes, and an interventionist foreign policy. It's far easier to get elected a Republican being pro-choice than anti-war.

The latest in this story: Murkowski prevails over Palin's anointed thug.

Ezra Klein yearns for one.