H

istory will tell the story of Alabama's recalcitrance. Again.

This time around, Public Service Commissioner Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh will play the role of George Wallace, standing defiantly in the Greenhouse door.

It's not about race this time. It's about humanity.

Wallace's populist poison of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" has given way to Cavanaugh's "jobs, jobs, jobs." The way she uses it, it's just as toxic.

Because Cavanaugh uses the genuine need for employment to feed the flames of willful ignorance. She dismisses those with fear for the air, or water, or the health of their children, as "environmental extremists." She writes off genuine concerns for climate change as "the bogus science claim of global warming."

She -- like Wallace -- has become a symbol of the futility of denial.

Jump on her bandwagon, if you really think Twinkle knows best. But when history plays out, you might come to look a lot like one of those white guys in T-shirts in those grainy photos outside Foster Auditorium, their faces screwed up in hatred, their fists in balls and their passion loaded up on the wrong side of right.

If the history of Alabama has taught us anything – if history ever teaches Alabama anything -- it is that what we do today matters tomorrow. Every time we ignore a changing world, each day we refuse to acknowledge facts or twist them to our own beliefs, we lose. And people get hurt.

And now the head of our very own "public service" commission tells the people of Alabama to ignore science that doesn't suit her political purposes. Believe instead in a science by political poll, a physics of denial. Trust in a science of fantasy, so we can continue to build public policy on the basis of how we wish things were.

Cavanaugh, backed by those who profit from keeping things as they are, from burning whatever fossil fuels we can find whenever and however we want, feeds the notion that global warming is a myth, that scientists are split on the issue, that environmentalists wake up every morning hating coal because, I suppose, they were naughty kids who got their fill of it in Christmas morning stockings.

Global warming is not a theory to be dismissed as bogus science. Not without risk, anyway. It is happening. And there is no great debate – outside of tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear news shows and political hack email chains -- in the real scientific community about whether it is caused by humans.

A recent study by a group of international researchers examined 11,944 climate abstracts – papers written by scientists on the issue of global warming. Among the scientists that took a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1 percent "endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming."

So in Alabama – and across much of the world, of course – we allow the loudest political mouths, the biggest deniers, to cling to that 3 percent, to use scientific outliers as proof when they call the other 97 percent "bogus."

They cling to the past for their own benefit. And put our future at risk.

George Wallace got a chance to change his mind. In the end he saw the price of his politics and – for all the good it did – apologized for the damage his own calculated words did.

Twinkle Cavanaugh – and the many so very like her – may not get that chance. They will stand, instead, symbols of the planet's greed, selfishness and futility.

John Archibald's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the Birmingham News, and on AL.com. Email him at jarchibald@al.com