"Science" as practiced by Mother Jones

I had to laugh when I read (via Glenn) the Mother Jones report today “Negative Energy.” Saith MJ:

With the Senate cap-and-trade bill on ice for the foreseeable future, a key bloc of Democrats is agitating for a Climate Plan B: an existing energy policy bill they say would put the US on the path to a clean energy future. Make that a road to nowhere. The bill in question lacks any kind of cap on carbon, and contains so many concessions to the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries that one environmental group has dubbed it a “flashback to Bush energy policy.”

No cap on carbon?! Sacré bleu…. but wait – there’s more (carbon bashing, that is):

Talk of a climate about-face intensified as news outlets reported last week that senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman—who are working to assemble a cross-party coalition to support climate legislation in the Senate—are planning to scrap a cap on carbon altogether. Graham, who was already on the record condemning the House and Senate cap-and-trade bills, declared in an interview with the New York Times that “some massive cap-and-trade system that regulates carbon in a fashion that drives up energy costs” is “dead.”

Evidently Mother Jones hasn’t gotten the message. Since Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, NASAgate, TemperatureDataGate, etc., etc., with more to come, almost everyone is now concerned that there is no real proof that CO2 causes global warming (if there is indeed any of the latter). Even The Guardian is jumping ship, but not MJ. Oh, well, there have to be some nostalgics.

Indeed, Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard is apparently still on the anti-nuclear bandwagon, as if we were still in the era of Meryl Streep driving panicked from the reactor in Silkwood. But that film was 1983 and since then the nuclear energy industry has made vast improvements. Nuclear is now arguably among the safest and cleanest energies available. The French and the Japanese, as we all know, have had great success with it. But Mother Jones is about the past, isn’t it? It celebrates this MJ – not this MJ.