10.20.2008

Obama's Greenmail and Growing Glaciers

If Barack Obama is elected President, within 18 months of his inauguration he intends to use the EPA and the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions as a "dangerous pollutant," according to a recent Wall St. Journal article. He'll push this plan forward if by then, Congress hasn't passed a cap-and-trade plan that he likes. Thus, the "greenmailing" of Congress.
Jason Grumet is ... one of Mr. Obama's key policy aides. In an interview last week with Bloomberg, Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency "would initiate those rulemakings" that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that "in the absence of Congressional action" 18 months after Mr. Obama's inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.
The article also draws attention to a similar plan that the EPA is already investigating. This is the same one that John Lewis and Paul Saunders are currently fighting. The EPA has published a draft plan to use the Clean Air Act to effectively regulate our economy out of existence in the name of fighting a fictitious global warming problem, and Lewis and Saunders are leading an effort to get EPA to abandon the idea.

Apparently, blocking it now may have no impact on what Obama decides to do once elected. This is disheartening, to say the least. The WSJ piece speculates that Obama is considering this greenmail move because of concern that he won't be able to convince enough people in his own party to pass cap-and-trade:
Thus Messrs. Obama and Grumet want to invoke a political deus ex machina driven by a faulty interpretation of the Clean Air Act to force Congress's hand. Mr. Obama and Democrats can then tell Americans that Congress must act to tax and regulate carbon to save the country from even worse bureaucratic consequences. It's Mr. Obama's version of Jack Benny's old "your money or your life" routine, but without the punch line.

The strategy is most notable for what it says about the climate-change lobby and its new standard bearer. Supposedly global warming is the transcendent challenge of the age, but Mr. Obama evidently doesn't believe he'll be able to convince his own party to do something about it without a bureaucratic ultimatum. Mr. Grumet justified it this way: "The U.S. has to move quickly domestically . . . We cannot have a meaningful impact in the international discussion until we develop a meaningful domestic consensus."

Normally a democracy reaches consensus through political debate and persuasion, but apparently for Mr. Obama that option is merely a nuisance. It's another example of "change" you'll be given no choice but to believe in. [bold added]

Growing Glaciers?
All of this is in light of limited but growing evidence that contradicts the global warming alarmists' hysterical ranting. From Investor's Buisness Daily, we see the following:
Funny how economic concerns pull the mind away from foolishness such as global warming. But weather goes on, and in many places it doesn't happen the way fear mongers predict.

Start with Alaska, a place in the news of late. The state's glaciers, after two centuries of shrinkage (a trend that began before the advent of the internal combustion engine and smokestack economy), actually grew during the winter of 2007-08.

"In general," Bruce Molnia, a U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist, told the Anchorage Daily News, "the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years."

Translation: It was so cold that the snow that causes glaciers to expand didn't melt until later than usual.

Meanwhile, the International Arctic Research Center reports 29% more Arctic sea ice this year than last. This doesn't exactly square with overheated predictions earlier in the year that the North Pole would be entirely free of ice over the summer for the first time in recorded history. [bold added]

The IBD editorial goes on to list a few more examples, and then closes with this:
These last four developments, taken together or separately, don't disprove the global warming theory. But unlike climate projection models, which are often wrong but endlessly thrown in our faces as examples of hard science, they are real world events wholly contrary to the story the alarmists have been spreading.

Global warm mongers are rapidly losing credibility. Mainstream journalists will still believe them because climate change fits the narrative they've so carefully nurtured. But eventually the error will have to admitted. It won't happen publicly, though, because by the time they come to their senses, the issue will have been long forgotten by the public. [bold added]

If Obama gets his way, the issue won't be long forgotten by the public, because we'll be living in a depressed and over-regulated economy, sacrificed to the false god of global warming.

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