Not coincidentally, Reagan, Thatcher, and GHWBush were central players in the end of the cold war. Reagan, for his immortal speech “Tear Down This Wall”, and for military firmness, Thatcher, for keeping Europe on board and for proving, in the Falklands, that Britain too still had the same stuff she had under Churchill, and finally, Bush, for his self-effacing determination not to crow or push for more during the implosion of the Soviet Union, but rather to act in such a way as to make it unmistakably clear that the U.S. was no national-security menace to Russia. His unilateral, major reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, as the opening gambit in an arms reduction negotiation, was brilliant.

Men and women of this caliber are made of the same stuff through and through. They face reality head on. And they don’t reflexively lie. (Never lying is not an option when you’re in the statecraft game.)

This, oh conservative friends, ye who have gone astray on the topic of AGW, is who led us in our greatest hour. These our heroes understood and granted the reality of AGW, back when it wasn’t so brutally, searingly, painfully, killingly obvious as it is now.

Churchill wrote, of war but the metaphor is apt, that Britain could have made its stand when it would have been easy. Or when it would have been feasible without shocking sacrifice. [Where we are now]. Having delayed too long, she must bear a rending struggle with outcome dubious [where we’ll be in 10, 20, 30 years—-the science of how bad it gets how fast is not nailed down sufficiently to say exactly]. Or, Churchill wrote, if action be delayed too long, the fight may have to be conducted against hopeless odds. [Where we’ll be, stuck with a climate that trims billions from the carrying capacity of the earth, if we wait 30, or 20, or 10 years too many.]

Right now, we can build the new infrastructure that will get us out of this fix. It’d be up and running in 20 years, with major parts of it up and running much sooner. The cost would be quite bearable; electricity some 10-20-30 percent more expensive than it would otherwise have seemed, [in reality, and counting the negative climate consequences, mining deaths, strip mining consequences to Appalachia, etc, less expensive].

This should have been the priority of the Bush years. It should have been Obama’s first priority. It can still be something we do, because even Republicans must see the national security implications of letting things drift. The armed forces are already putting together case studies and contingency plans for the wars that will attend unmitigated AGW.