Leader of None
“Few challenges facing
The President and Al Gore are certainly ready to lead. But how many will follow?
Even in
The House of Representatives passed a 1400-page energy and climate bill
– by a razor-thin margin, and only after Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman packed
it with enough last-minute deals to protect favored congressional districts, buy
votes, and curry favor with assorted special interests. Not one
legislator actually read the bill – which would create a trillion-dollar
cap-trade-and-tax industry, ensure that energy and food costs “necessarily
skyrocket,” kill jobs, and impose an all-intrusive
Republicans want to control what people do in their bedrooms, insists the old canard. Democrats, it appears, want to dictate what we do everywhere outside of our bedrooms. And Sancho Gore wants to become the world’s first global warming billionaire, by selling climate indulgences, a.k.a. carbon offsets.
The reaction has been predictable – by anyone except House and White House czars and czarinas.
Citizens are livid over yet another attempt to use a purported crisis to justify further expanding the government and spending billions more tax dollars for alarmist research, activism, and propaganda, just ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. Global warming continues to rank dead-last in Pew Research and other polls that actually list it as an issue. Rasmussen puts the President’s approval ratings at 46% and falling. Zogby reports that 57% of Americans oppose cap-and-trade bills.
Manufacturing states, which get 60-98% of their electricity from coal, worry that the only thing they’ll export in ten years will be jobs. Democrat senators from those states worry that the energy and climate issue will be “toxic for them during midterm elections,” says Politico magazine.
Even companies that had eagerly sought seats at the negotiating table are now gagging. ConocoPhillips, Caterpillar, and others finally realize that cap-and-tax will severely penalize them and their customers.
Not even the climate is
cooperating. Outside of
In
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic aide bluntly dismissed
any talk of following President Obama’s quixotic lead. “We won’t sacrifice
economic growth for the sake of emission reduction,” he told reporters at the
July 2009 G8 meeting.
Chinese and Indian leaders are equally adamant.
So is
No electricity means no refrigeration, to keep food and medicines from spoiling. It means no water purification, to reduce baby-killing intestinal diseases. It means no modern heating and air conditioning, to reduce hypothermia in winter, heat stroke in summer, and lung disease year-round. It means no lights or computers, no modern offices, factories, schools, shops, clinics, or hospitals.
Fossil fuels are “gradually eliminating poverty in the Third world,” observes UCLA economist Deepak Lal. Any call to curb carbon emissions would “condemn billions to continued poverty. While numerous Western do-gooders shed crocodile tears about the Third World’s poor, they are willing to prevent them from taking the only feasible current route out from this abject state” – oil, gas, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric energy development. The situation is intolerable, unsustainable, lethal and immoral.
The only way India and China would
agree to cut their emissions is if the United States cut its emissions 40% by
2020, says Ramesh – back to 1959 levels
and pre-JFK living standards, when the US population was 179 million (versus
306 million today). No way will that happen. So Asian energy and economic
development will continue apace – and rightly so, to foster human rights and environmental
justice.
All is not bleak, however, for Canute Obama’s impossible dream of controlling global temperatures.
British politicians remain committed to slashing CO2
emissions and replacing hydrocarbons with wind power. Unfortunately, the biggest
UK wind projects have been abandoned or put on indefinite hold – and a growing
demand/supply imbalance portends still higher energy prices, widespread power
cuts, rolling blackouts, and energy rationing, the Daily Telegraph reported on August 31. Brits may soon trade their
stiff upper lips for contentious town hall meetings and ballot-box revolution.
The Democratic Party of Japan’s landslide victory in the August 30 election will likely create a new coalition government tilted strongly to the left. The DJP has pledged to cut carbon dioxide gas emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 – though this will likely strangle economic growth and job creation, especially if one coalition partner’s opposition to nuclear power becomes DJP policy.
Then there is
Of course, the
real goal was never to control the climate. It was always to control energy
use, lives, jobs, economies, transportation, and housing – and usher in a new
era of high-tax global governance. The American people are increasingly saying
they’re not ready to grant that power to Obama, Gore & Company.
Paul Driessen is senior policy
advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial
Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism:
Green power ∙ Black death.
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