Reading a NYT article on a coal plant's attempt at carbon sequestration. . .

and paused at this quote:

“It doesn’t matter to me if a scientist says it may or may not leak,” said Elisa Young, an anti-coal activist who lives nearby on the Ohio side of the river. “That’s not going to stop it from leaking when push comes to shove.” (emphasis mine)

I know what she's trying to say, but it still strikes me because the skepticism is so intense that I could easily see an equivalent situation where a hard-line conservative would have the same animosity toward a particular "liberal" issue.

Full disclosure: I am in favor of a large and diverse energy portfolio to drastically reduce our carbon output in the next few decades. We've dragged our feet so long on this issue that I'm not sure if we can even afford to have the same skittishness on issues such as nuclear or CCS. That is not to say that we should ignore the very real issues that nuclear and CCS raise, such as storage and disposal for the former and direct and indirect effects of carbon acidification.

Honestly, though, I am just so happy that we're finally on the cusp of some very real measures to reduce our impact on climate, even if we have to wade through a lot of political BS and anti-intellectual arguments by lay people who believe they have caught some detail debunking global warming, despite the fact that thousands upon thousands of scientists have researched this for decades. It has been insulting to say the least, having studied climate science and knowing full well about peer-reviewed science and the politicization of climate change. It's why I went to law school and what I hope to work on after I have officially passed the bar.