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Beck misconstrues Joel Rogers video
On his program of 5/12, Glenn Beck again played a video clip of Joel Rogers discussing climate change. Beck has repeatedly claimed that the establishment of a climate change exchange is a criminal conspiracy. Unfortunately, he has yet to identify which law is being broken.
Beck calls out names behind this alleged “syndicate,” and at the forefront is Joel Rogers. Did Beck misconstrue the statements Rogers made in a speech that Beck shows a brief segment of? Beck introduced the video: “Even the progressive wizard, the man behind the curtain of Crime, Inc., Joel Rogers, admits that cap-and-trade will not help the Earth in any way, shape or form. Here, watch; his words, not mine.”
Rogers: “I hope you all realize that you could eliminate every power plant in America today and you could stop every car in America, take out the entire power generation sector, take out all of the transportation sector, and you still wouldn’t be anywhere near 80% below 1990 levels. You’d be closer to 60%. You be about 68%, and that’s bringing the economy to a complete halt, basically.”
Rogers, seen here, was trying to explain how far away from getting a handle on carbon emissions the United States is. Explaining it as he did, Rogers appeared to be using what’s called a heuristic device which is “an abstract concept or model useful for thinking about social and physical phenomena.”
Beck himself used such a device during his 5/5/10 show when he explained how much every tax payer would have to make to pay off the national debt and unfunded liabilities in one year if they had a tax rate of 70%. On its own, the notion was absurd, just like “bringing the economy to a complete halt” is absurd. As concepts to emphasize what tax payers owe (Beck’s heuristic device) or to clarify how far the U.S. has to go to get control of atmospheric carbon (Rogers’ heuristic device), they’re useful.
From the March 2008 Take Back America conference, The New Green Deal [Rogers begins speaking at 33 minutes; this section begins at about 39 minutes into the video]:
From the March 2008 Take Back America conference, The New Green Deal [Rogers begins speaking at 33 minutes; this section begins at about 39 minutes into the video]:
Rogers: The deal in American politics I'd recommend to all of us, as sort of a new mantra on federalism, is that we should all be for progressive federalism, which means that any state policy -- we should sort of set federal floors, but not ceilings, on state innovation -- and any state policies which go above that floor, in this case, reducing, you know, GHG emissions should be encouraged and not pre-empted by the federal policy. So, again, I don't see a major problem in the political architecture of all this.But in terms of realizing the equity aspects of it, I think that's gonna be a much harder lift. I think we do in fact need a movement out there which is pushing for that all the time, and very vigorously and very loudly. We heard today -- this morning from Reverend Jackson and Roger Wilkins and other saints of the civil rights movement how important it was to have a third rail, third force out there pushing. I think it's going to be particularly important, and I don't think we're there yet, in terms of the infrastructure for that movement.Consider the scale of what we're talking about. This is partly an echo to what Phil was just saying, but maybe here's a way to think about it. A lot of you say that, "Well, let's have an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions below 1990 levels by 2050." Right? That's a common sort of demand. I hope you all realize that you could eliminate every power plant in America today, and you could stop every car in America, take out the entire power generation sector, take out all of the transportation sector, and you still wouldn't be anywhere near 80 percent below 1990 levels. You'd be closer to 60 percent, you'd be at around 68 percent. And that's bringing the economy to a complete halt, basically. That's sort of a challenge. And then on our side -- so, it's important to, you know, appreciate the dimensions of the challenge.And then on our side, you know, we celebrate our small successes, and I do think there's a big success here. We're basically responsible -- years of environmental work, years of coalition-building with the labor movement and community groups -- to actually get these four different groups -- this is what Apollo's one contribution is. I think it's an important contribution to get progressive business, labor, environmentalists -- essentially white-dominated labor -- and heavily communities of color, heavily urban-based, to see that they have a common interest in a project. And it's great, it's great. And that success should be celebrated, and the fact the science is on our side, and that it's now becoming mainstream politics, it's great.
Beck doesn’t let Rogers’ intention interfere with Beck’s intention, to distort what Rogers was saying and take it out of context, a common Beck ploy. Beck followed Rogers’ video clip by saying: ”So we can all live in teepees, and we still won’t save the Earth.”
No Mr. Beck, it means that we have a long way to go tofundamentally transform our carbon based, fossil fuel driven economy to a sustainable, non-carbon based energy that can and must fuel our economy and transportation sectors in the future.
Joel Rogers’ Response
Rogers explained to the Review that what he was saying in the video clip that Beck has repeatedly replayed to his viewers was not “a heuristic, but a thought experiment:“
Rogers: “My point at that CAP conference was that activists often underestimate how deep the transformation of our economy’s got to be. I think I made some fun of politicians promising carbon emissions reductions on the order of 80 percent below 1990 levels anytime soon. All I was saying at CAP was that eliminating even the entirety of the Electric Power and Transportation end-user sectors (leaving only Residential, Commercial, and Industrial) wouldn’t get you there… I certainly don’t want to stop the economy in its tracks.”
At one point in this episode, Beck pointed at Rogers’ picture andcalled him a Marxist, as Beck is prone to do no matter what the facts are. Rogers’ response was straightforward: “I’m not a Marxist. I understand a Marxist to be someone who believes that endogenous development of the forces of production (technology) will create a successful agent of socialist revolution. I don’t think it will. It sure hasn’t yet.”
Beck also claimed that this need to transform our economy thus is to protect the planet “1,000 years from now.” It’s much more urgent than that, but Beck knows all about the future, remember? Really? No, he does not; and the more you read here on The Glenn Beck Review, the more you’ll realize it.
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