As the Senate considers the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill this week, we’re finally seeing some media coverage of the policy debate. Sadly, but predictably, we’re still seeing conservative spin infect the coverage.
in particular, news outlets are playing up distortions about what the cost of action would be to consumers.
A report on NPR today produced a Fox-style “fair and balanced” report, pairing arguments from competing organizations like the environmental Natural Resources Defense Council and the anti-environment right-wing front group the National Association of Manufacturers.
But NPR offered, as an seemingly objective “environmental analyst,” a representative from American Enterprise Institute, without identifying the organization as a conservative group. The AEI spokesperson proceeds to offer some ludicrous fuzzy math, unchallenged by NPR:
It’s not very hard math to say, one trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans is this many dollars per American.
And once those numbers start being generated and start being publicized, the public is not going to be amused. Every poll suggests that people do not want to pay more for greenhouse gas reductions. They don’t want to pay more in gas taxes. They don’t want to pay higher energy rates. They just don’t want to pay.
Of course, nothing in the pending Lieberman-Warner bill, or any other proposal to cap carbon emissions, would impose such a cost on every single American.

From www.OurFuture.org