Global Warming Overreach
Ubiquitous
Congressman Henry Waxman played to the crowds this week with high-profile
hearings designed to boost his climate legislation. To listen to the Energy
and Commerce committee chair, a House global warming bill is all but in the
recyclable bag.
To listen to Congressman Jim Matheson is something else. During opening
statements, the Utah Democrat detailed 14 big problems he had with the bill,
and told me later that if he hadn't been limited to five minutes, "I might
have had more." Mr. Matheson is one of about 10 moderate committee Democrats
who are less than thrilled with the Waxman climate extravaganza, and who may
yet stymie one of Barack Obama's signature issues. If so, the president can
thank Democratic liberals, who are engaging in one of their first big cases of
overreach.
Not that you couldn't see this coming even last year, when Speaker Nancy
Pelosi engineered her coup against former Energy chairman John Dingell. House
greens had been boiling over the Michigan veteran's cautious approach to
climate-legislation. Mr. Dingell's mistake was understanding that when it
comes to energy legislation, the divides aren't among parties, but among
regions. Design a bill that socks it to all those manufacturing,
oil-producing, coal-producing, coal-using states, and say goodbye to the very
Democrats necessary to pass that bill.
Such sense didn't deter Mrs. Pelosi, who first tried an end-run around Mr.
Dingell in 2007 by putting Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey in charge of a new
global-warming committee. When that didn't get her a bill, she helped her
fellow Californian, Mr. Waxman, unseat Mr. Dingell. Environmentalists threw a
party, and the Waxman-Markey duo got busy on legislation to please their
coastal crowds.
Cap and trade was already going to be a brawl, but the two upped the ante by
including tougher targets and restrictions. If that weren't enough, they
rolled in every other item on the green wish list: a renewable electricity
standard; a low-carbon fuel standard; a broader renewable fuels policy; new
efficiency standards. Any one of these is a monumental fight on its own. Put
together they risk an intra-party committee mutiny.
There's Mr. Matheson, chair of the Blue Dog energy task force, who has made a
political career championing energy diversity and his state's fossil fuels,
and who understands Utah is mostly reliant on coal for its electricity needs.
He says he sees several ways this bill could result in a huge "income
transfer" from his state to those less fossil-fuel dependent. Indiana Democrat
Baron Hill has a similar problem; not only does his district rely on coal, it
is home to coal miners. Rick Boucher, who represents the coal-fields of South
Virginia, knows the feeling.
Or consider Texas's Gene Green and Charles Gonzalez, or Louisiana's Charlie
Melancon, oil-patch Dems all, whose home-district refineries would be taxed
from every which way by the bill. Mr. Dingell remains protective of his
district's struggling auto workers, which would be further incapacitated by
the bill. Pennsylvania's Mike Doyle won't easily throw his home-state steel
industry over a cliff.
Add in the fact that a number of these Democrats hail from districts that
could just as easily be in Republicans' hands. They aren't eager to explain to
their blue-collar constituents the costs of indulging Mrs. Pelosi's San
Francisco environmentalists. Remember 1993, when President Bill Clinton
proposed an energy tax on BTUs? The House swallowed hard and passed the
legislation, only to have Senate Democrats kill it; a year later, Newt
Gingrich was in charge. With Senate Democrats already backing away from the
Obama cap-and-trade plans, at least a few House Dems are reluctant to walk the
plank.
Rumors were in fact flying earlier this week that Mr. Markey might have to
postpone next week's subcommittee markup. For now, he and Mr. Waxman are busy
trying to buy or arm-twist votes. They have some potent tools, in particular
the enticement of giving some carbon-emission permits away for free, or
allocating them to specific industries. Yet having set expectations so high,
the duo risk losing liberal members if they give away too much.
The Obama team is aware it has trouble, which explains last week's well-timed
Environmental Protection Agency "finding" that carbon is a danger. The
administration is now using this as a stick to beat Congress to act, arguing
that if it doesn't the EPA will. (Reality: Any EPA actions will be tied up in
court for years.) It also helps explain EPA's Monday analysis claiming the
legislation won't cost all that much. (Reality: The agency could only make
this claim by assuming an endless recession.)
The real risk to the president is that his bill goes down at the hands of his
own party -- with nary a Republican to blame. Whether Mrs. Pelosi and Mr.
Waxman considered this as they crafted their gem is unclear. But the overreach
has made it a possibility now.
Ubiquitous
change to fighting the Nazis during World War Two," London's Daily Mail
reports:
Mr Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the climate change
film An Inconvenient Truth, said the greatest challenge would
be to convince people that the threat from climate change was
as urgent as the threat from Nazi Germany.
"It can happen. It will happen. We have everything we need
except political will, and political will is a renewable
resource.
"We can berate politicians for not doing enough, and compromising
too much, and not being bold and addressing this existential
threat to civilisation.
"But the reason they don't is that the level of concern among
populations has still not risen to cross the threshold to make
the political leaders feel they must address it."
It's an imperfect analogy, to say the least. The Allies in Europe did not
declare war on Germany until after it had invaded Poland, and the U.S. until
more than two years after that. The Nazi threat was far clearer than the
"existential threat" from global warming, which is hypothetical and quite
possibly hyperbolic.
A better analogy would be to Saddam Hussein's weapons programs in 2003. The
threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be
nonexistent, was overstated by people who had an interest in believing, or in
convincing others, that the Iraqi regime was dangerous. Not all such people
were noble in their intensions; as we noted last week, Saddam himself
encouraged the belief that he had such weapons in order to cow his enemies.
Some global warmists seem to have goals other than "saving" the "planet," as
suggested by this Reuters report:
To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and
poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts
on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest
greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.
Since about half the planet's climate-warming emissions come
from less than a billion of its people, it makes sense to
follow these rich folks when setting national targets to
cut carbon dioxide emissions, the authors wrote on Monday
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As it stands now, under the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol,
rich countries shoulder most of the burden for cutting the
emissions that spur global warming, while developing
countries--including fast-growing economies China and India--are
not required to curb greenhouse pollution.
Rich countries, notably the United States, have said this
gives developing countries an unfair economic advantage;
China, India and other developing countries argue that
developed countries have historically spewed more climate-warming
gases, and developing countries need time to catch up.
If carbon is really destroying the planet, why in the world would it be
desirable for developing countries to "catch up"? "Climate change" here
appears a convenient pretext for reviving socialist ideas that have been
economically discredited--although somehow we have a feeling Al Gore would
somehow manage to stay rich even under a regime of class warmfare.
--
"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem.
Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an
overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a
predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and
how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."
-- Al Gore acknowledges exaggerating the dangers of "global warming"
IAAH
Your little screed would be a lot more convincing if you
weren't actually lying about what Gore said in that
untruthful sig of yours.
--
"...it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep
your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand:
'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path;
that's a quitter's way out."
- Sarah Palin, as she quits her job half-way through her term.
Logic
Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote:
Gasp! The poor rich! They're always such hapless victims.
Ubiquitous
>Ubiquitous wrote:
>Your little screed would be a lot more convincing if you weren't
>actually lying about what Gore said in that untruthful sig of yours.
In other words, you are unable to offer a rebuttle and are attempting
to sidetrack the debate. And yes, AlGore actually did say that in an
interview about his fake documentary. Score: two for me, zero for you.