Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets Page B

humans are not capable of destroying it.” He was especially scathing about the apocalyptic scenarios for the destruction of the planet whose purpose was to instill “terror, dread and apprehension about the future.”
    It took more than a little chutzpah for a college dropout to take on the august scientists and Ivy League progressive activists who were the spokespeople for environmentalism. But Limbaugh was a skeptic, unimpressed by the expertise of the experts, and willing to challenge them.
    He had been given his first chance to really take on the environmentalists in 1992, when Ted Koppel invited him to debate Senator Al Gore on ABC’s Nightline . Like the first Ali-Liston bout, it looked like a ridiculous mismatch: Al Gore, of St. Albans Prep and Harvard, the esteemed author of the critically acclaimed Earth in the Balance , up against a dumb, right-wing radio ranter (the epithet “global warming denier” had not yet been invented). Liberals were looking forward to a slaughter.
    Gore opened by warning of “a global ecological crisis that is more serious than anything human civilization has ever faced.” There were many ecological challenges facing the world, he said, but singled out “the hole in the ozone layer—which now could appear above the United States,” climate change, the imminent destruction of the rain forests, and pollution of the oceans and the atmosphere.
    Limbaugh was visibly amused by this litany of present and future disaster. “There is no ozone hole above the United States,” he stated flatly. “I don’t think the ecology is fragilely balanced.” He attributed such concerns to a “doomsday industry” typified by Hollywood airheads whose naïveté and need for image-building charities made them useful idiots for the environmentalist movement.
    Gore responded by agreeing with Limbaugh that their key disagreement was whether the earth is fragile. He mentioned the growing number of people on the planet, an iconic concern of population pessimists since Malthus. Then, a Sunday punch—“new technologies we’ve never had before, like chlorofluorocarbons.”
    Koppel was evidently impressed. “I don’t know anybody on Capitol Hill who is more knowledgeable on the subject of environment than Al Gore. You have to take seriously what he says.”
    Limbaugh didn’t have to and he didn’t. He knew perfectly well that Gore wasn’t a climatologist, he just played one on TV. “If you listen to what Senator Gore said, it is manmade products which are causing the ozone depletion. Yet Mt. Pinatubo has put 570 times the amount of chlorine into the atmosphere in one eruption than all of manmade chlorofluorocarbons in one year; and the ultraviolet radiation measured on this country’s surface since 1974 has shown no increase whatsoever. And if there’s ozone depletion going on, you’re going to have UV radiation levels going way up, and they simply aren’t. The sun makes ozone, and there’s an ozone hole in the Antarctic Circle and the Arctic Circle simply because the sun is below the horizon for a portion of the year.”
    In 2008 Limbaugh rebroadcast part of his debate with Gore. The ex- vice president had since won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his environmental endeavors. He had also become an environmental businessman and investor, parlaying his high profile and Washington connections into a multimillion-dollar empire of “green” enterprises. 4 There was still no hole in the ozone layer over the United States. The world’s temperature hadn’t risen in almost a decade. Here and there you could still find some trees. “Sixteen years ago he was making the same arguments,” Limbaugh said. Limbaugh thought global warming was a hoax in 1992, and nothing that had happened since had changed his mind.
    I once asked Limbaugh what he would change if he got a career do-over. He replied that there was no major issue he had ever changed his mind about, and that he regretted nothing he had ever