I’m amazed this made it into the Washington Post – Anthony
The economy stagnates. Syria burns . Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him , even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change .
Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide:
Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.
Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.
On the contrary. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.
For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?
The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.
And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96?percent of humankind.
At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”
Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.
But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.
The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.
To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?
Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.
I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.
For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.
Source: Washington Post
“I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But….”
being a psychiatrist, perhaps he is using rhetoric here to placate (by establishing common ground) and persuade his audience (AGW crowd) to his arguments.
also, the word “but” negates all that has been said before it.
Obama was very late coming to the climate party and arrives just as the key players finish their idle talk, put on their coats and leave to go home.
tonyb
Krauthammer shows a serious problem that civilized man has. He “knows” that CO2 causes the global temperature to rise, just as he once knew that the Earth was the center of the Universe. We have been told that so often that it is a part of most cultures. It is going to be very hard to eradicate, although a lot of evidence says otherwise. It would be interesting to take a poll of the entire population of the United States: How many people don’t believe it to be true?
There is a host of self-centred and greedy ulterior motives different people have for supporting the CAGW paradigm.
1- For researchers, once a paradigm becomes popular and dominant, it is career limiting to oppose it.
2- If the climate is presented as something about which governments can make policies, then government money will flow for research. If climate is something that we cannot affect, funding is not going to be as forthcoming.
3- Plus of course it gives researchers a good feeling to imagine that they’re working to ‘save the world’ instead of, say, developing a new scent for feminine hygiene products.
4- Environmentalists see carbon emission control as a means to reduce real pollutants like NOx, SO2, Hg, etc. as a side effect.
5- Luddites see carbon strangulation as a way of dismantling the industrial economies to force everyone to a much reduced subsistence.
6- ‘Personal isolationists’ try to use AGW as a way to eliminate big utility companies, with power generated at home from wind, solar, or even car batteries, and even sold to the local grid at retail (or higher) rates.
7- EU trade isolationists see carbon regulation as a way of increasing the energy cost, and thus decreasing the competitiveness, of North American economies _vis a vis_ EU ones.
8- Opportunities to use carbon emissions as pretexts to block or heavily tariff imports abound, thus degrading international trade even further.
9- Local trade isolationists like the idea of overseas products becoming more expensive, and if they can’t do that by punitive tariffs and quotas, they hope to do so by artificially driving up shipping costs.
10- Various people see Kyoto-type agreements as a way of transferring wealth from developed economies to lesser ones, as the one-time Canadian Liberal Party cabinet minister Stewart once claimed.
11- Some also envision carbon strangulation as a pretext for involving governments deeply into the economy, via direct and indirect subsidies for energy alternatives that can claim to be ‘green’. Naturally, those who are involved and invested in such industries have their own greed factor.
12- Believers in Big Government also love the idea of sending governments even more of our money under any pretext, and use carbon taxes as a way to transfer even more money to people in lower income levels.
13- Some politicians see taking ‘the west’ off oil as a means of removing the dependence the US in particular has on politically uncertain sources.
14- Other politicans see ‘cap & trade’ or other quota management as a way to direct corruption to their buddies and relatives.
15- Nuclear energy proponents see carbon strangulation as a way to promote nuclear power.
16- Some people imagine that energy cost reductions will magically pay for, and even squeeze profit from, expensive carbon control technologies whose payback times are actually measured (when they aren’t just dead costs) in decades.
17- Opportunistic “businessmen” see the panic of the masses as an opportunity to solicit donations to so-called “non-profit” organizations or to operate carbon credit companies in order to enrich themselves financially.
18- Financial trading corporations like Goldman Sachs see carbon trading as an opportunity to generate a new financial bubble out of an inexistant commodity (carbon credits) with which to justify huge profits and staggering executive bonuses.
19- In politics it is generally held far more important to be consistent than it is to be right. Lies and errors about warming are thus propagated further, instead of being squelched, in order to bolster the political optics.
20- Some people propose deliberately crushing economic growth to be an improvement over what they think will happen if we let growth proceed naturally.
21- The UN sees carbon credits as an opportunity to create a tax base for itself and a steady income.
22- And there are some who are actually sincere, who desperately want to believe that they can by sacrificing (or by forcing the rest of us to sacrifice) contribute to saving the world. But just because you make a sacrifice to superstition doesn’t mean that your AGW deity is going to come through for you.
Charles Krauthammer is my favorite analyst on TV. I always try to listen to his opinions and it is one of the reasons I watch “Special Report” on Fox News at 6 PM to get his take on important issues of the day. He is generally on the panel of the program and he is always eloquent, full of insight, and generally factual (in my opinion) although I don’t always agree with his points. The downside of the program, since Fox is fair and balanced, Juan Williams is also normally on the panel and his role in life is to support the administration regardless of how wrong and lacking facts his opinion happens to be.
I agree with others and am disappointed in his comment regarding the desire for global reduction of CO2 emissions. His point is accurate however that the developing nations are not going to accept CO2 emission reductions since they know burning carbon this is the key to getting out of “poverty” and developing industry.
I wish the Administration shared this wisdom.
As Charles put it ” To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy.”
Does anyone with a brain think otherwise? Well maybe Juan will repeat it anyway.
What Dr Krauthammer doesn’t mention (but I’m sure he understands) is that this President doesn’t need to DO anything about an issue (except stall, delay and deny) as long he is on the side of his political fanatics (greens, Hollywood) and political funders (Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffet el al).
“You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.
Doesn’t that phrase just sum it up on so many levels!
Mark and two Cats says:
July 7, 2013 at 11:06 am
“. . . then declare bankruptcy and evaporate with the money.”
It is a bit more sophisticated than your statement implies. Neither the money nor the major investors “evaporate.” Usually there has been a very direct transfer of wealth from tax payers to someone (or several) that invested some amount to create an operation that was then leveraged into a source of funds that could make a payday. After bankruptcy there are assets that need to be liquidated at cents on the dollar. Who better to take these assets off the market than someone very close to the operation? Then there are capital losses that sometimes can be transferred and carried forward for the new (old) investors. The big headline (Bankrupt!) is reported. The next news cycle happens and the story evaporates but the scurrying for the underlying wealth goes on. And on.
Mike Kelter, you bring up a few good questions, and the answers are a bit upsetting.
The EPA can regulate any air pollutant as they see fit, and is not bound by a cost/benefit analysis. The SCOTUS has determined that CO2 is an air pollutant, and the EPA determined that it endangers human health, therefore they can regulate it. Congress has given them far more authority than they should have, and until that authority is modified, they are free to destroy the economy as they see fit. The zealots at EPA are drooling over the wealth they now have the power to redistribute.
When you think about the relative needs of the two types of life on Earth — plants and animals — you have to realize we’re pretty lucky. Or blessed.
Plants only need around 250 ppm of CO2 to thrive. They’ll do better with more, of course, and I don’t know what a plant optimum would be. The CO2 levels they love have absolutely no effect on our aspiration. On the other hand, we need O2 levels of around 200,000 ppm to thrive. More might be better, but we definitely have a high limit after which oxygen does Bad Things.
How lucky we are that the plants which produce the relatively high level of oxygen we need to live are unaffected by that oxygen, while the CO2 they need leaves us just as unaffected.
If that’s not a symbiosis, I don’t know what is.
Here’s an article I wrote for our paper, the Evansville Courier and Press:
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/may/30/co2-overhyped-as-air-pollution-threat/
My objective was to present this issue from a unique perspective that might sneak some legit facts into some closed minds. The bias on this issue and the internet still having countless sources that reinforce the junk science hypnosis make that challenging.
Most people, after deciding they know something, interpret new information differently than before. If it confirms what they know, it gets stored as knowledge. If it contradicts what they know, it gets rejected.
Evidence of this can be seen from the 64 comments to my article. I was chief meteorologist on one of our local tv stations from 1982-93, with many of the readers aware of this. SInce that time, the paper has always been thrilled to print the 25 or so articles that I sent them.
This is another one from last month, that discusses tornado’s.
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/jun/16/modern-technology-lessens-threat-from-tornadoes/
“Fortunately, the warming of higher latitudes in the 1980s and 1990s decreased the meridional temperature contrast that provides the energy for these type of tornadoes. As a result, over the past 40 years, strong and violent tornadoes have decreased. From 1954 to 1974, with modest global cooling, the United States had 7 years with 70 or more strong to violent tornadoes. Since 1974, there has only been one year, 2011 with that many of the most destructive and deadly tornadoes”
Gareth Phillips says: @ur momisugly July 7, 2013 at 9:53 am
Syria? If he keeps you guys out of another Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam he will have been one of your best Presidents ever and will have saved countless lives of young Americans. This site may hate his politics with a vengeance, but you could have done with him in the run up to the pointless wars both our countries have become enmeshed in….
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AFGHANISTAN: After the August 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on militant training camps in Afghanistan….
VIETNAM Eisenhower sent military advisers to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam on November 1, 1955 before French troops left the country. In May 1961 President Kennedy (D) sent 400 United States Army Special Forces personnel to South Vietnam and in October Robert S. McNamara recommends sending six divisions (200,000 men) to Vietnam and in 1962 President Kennedy signs the Foreign Assistance Act of 1962, which provides “…military assistance to countries which are on the rim of the Communist world and under direct attack.” by November of 1963 Kennedy had increased the number of Americans in Vietnam to 16,000. President Johnson (D) after Kennedy’s assassination appointed General Westmoreland who expanded the number of US troops after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident on August 2, 1964. American forces rose from 16,000 during 1964 to more than 553,000 by 1969. It was Nixon (R) who laid the groundwork for the departure of U.S. troops in 1973.
IRAQ You could go back to President Carter(D) not supporting the Shah of Iraq in 1979 or further back to President Eisenhower’s interference to bring the Shah back to the throne or even further back to the imperial UK. Either way there was a backlash to the Shah’s attempt to drag his country into the 20th Century setting the stage for Bush (R) to attack after the 9/11 attack on the towers.
And you forgot OBAMA’S military intervention in Libya in 2011.
To say “The Democrats” or to say “The Republicans” got us into a war is to show massive ignorance of history and politics.
It is why CONGRESS has to approve a declaration of War BTW Article I Section 8 of the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to declare War. Officially, this power has only been used by Congress for five conflicts. It has been nearly 70 years since the last time Congress has declared war. It is worth reading the whole article. Seems Congress has sued the Admin. for exceeding its powers on several occasions including suing Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter. In all cases the judiciary turned tail and fled the fight.
What we need are a couple of distinctly cool years. That will give the hidden skeptics in the mainstream the cover they need to come out with their doubts.
“EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Threat to Public Health, Welfare / Proposed Finding Comes in Response to 2007 Supreme Court Ruling”
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/0ef7df675805295d8525759b00566924
The Supreme court ruling was a split decision. All the liberal judges went one way and conservatives the other. As Downdraft stated, the EPA can now regulate CO2 any way it deems fit.
In fact, they already have. Any new power plants built must have a carbon capture technology that has not been invented yet……….meaning that, no new power plants can be built that will use coal……..period.
http://www.usclimatenetwork.org/resource-database/carbon-pollution-standards-faqs/
I did take him to task on that ( co2 nonsense) as he is a fellow blogger at the Patriot Post
Mike Kelter says: @ur momisugly July 7, 2013 at 10:27 am
…WUWT is read by many smart people. Maybe some of these smart readers can help me with a few questions….
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From the fight over Animal ID (NAIS) I can tell you that the EPA, USDA, FDA et al can make laws without Congressional approval. It did go before the Supreme Court who said as long as the proposed regulations were posted in the Federal Register for a comment period by the public the regulations would stand as laws without going through Congress. (Yeah I know GRRRrrr)
This means someone (Heartland, CFact, Competitive Enterprise Institute or whoever) has to wade through the Federal Register EVERY DAY to see when the comment period is open and then broadcast it to skeptics. You may be sure the Astroturf Greenie movements have a direct line into the EPA. Think the EPA’s secret email alias of “Richard Windsor”
This is a starting place https://www.federalregister.gov/environment
Whether we out number the mindless green drones remains to be seen. Also the bureaucrats DO NOT GIVE UP. After several tries and a HE!! NO! response from the public each time we still got Animal ID we just delayed it by five years. This was trumpeted as “Listening to our objections and devising a compromise” It was started under Clinton still pursued under Bush and finally implemented under Obama. The political party ‘In Power’ didn’t mean a hill of beans in the pressure to implement the program. Farmers though Obama would support them but no such luck.
Just 25% of voters think the federal government today has their consent and more Americans than ever (63%) think a government that is too powerful is a bigger danger in the world today than one that is not powerful enough. Also from Rasmussen polls Just seven percent (7%) of voters think Congress is doing a good or excellent job, talk about a vote of no confidence! 51% of voters think all EPA regulations should require congressional approval before they can be implemented. That’s up eight points from 43% in late December.
Neil,Dirk and CKD, thanks for the responses. Uncomfortable stuff eh? I take the point about the drones though. By the way, the response is only off topic if you discount the original post. Cheers G
ckb says:
July 7, 2013 at 10:21 am
Gareth: If Chamberlain were alive today he could well have written your post.
Ask Iraqis and Kuwaitis if they think the Gulf War was pointless. While America cannot police the world we can pick our battles carefully. Where fanaticism is in play it is folly to now think we can cover our eyes. Isolationism delays the inevitable conflicts or trades the liberty of Western Societies for the liberty of others. It is a trade our leaders are usually unwilling to make – at least those who know their history.
If your point is to keep your head down until the fight is at your door, I can at least understand that. If your point is that you keep your head down thinking the fight will never come to your door – I hope the tin foil hat protects you.
Gareth responds,
Hey, get it right, it’s a tin hat! I take your point though, some wars have to be fought, but it does not mean we should go out looking for them, especially when we are counting every penny.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs says:
July 7, 2013 at 2:47 pm
It is why CONGRESS has to approve a declaration of War BTW Article I Section 8 of the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to declare War. Officially, this power has only been used by Congress for five conflicts. It has been nearly 70 years since the last time Congress has declared war. It is worth reading the whole article. Seems Congress has sued the Admin. for exceeding its powers on several occasions including suing Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter. In all cases the judiciary turned tail and fled the fight.
Thanks Gail, good analysis of the complexities and how easy it is to slide into these things without Parliamentary or Congressional approval. In comparison Climate issues may waste money, but they don’t waste lives.
Thanks Anthony, good reporting. Charles Krauthammer is a regular opinion writer at the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/charles-krauthammer/2011/02/24/ADJkW7B_page.html). He does not appear to have gone much into the CO2 climate sensitivity controversy and accepts the IPCC view.
But, he sees the distraction and the damage from the “war on carbon”.
Indeed. Gareth is one of the last remaining members of Hussein’s Iraqi Republican Guard, reduced to the silly crying girl saying ‘You should’a left Saddam alone, he wasn’t hurting anybody except Arabs‘. How shocking to hear such pompousness from westerners blogging from their comfortable chairs on their iPads and laptops. Does he not know that they have much more free elections and independent news media now ( quite possibly freer and more independent than ours here in the USA )? Clearly there is nothing stopping him now from going to Baghdad and leading a movement to return the nation to the good old days of Ba’ath tyranny. He could lead a march, a demonstration, and carry signs or something.
He rarely mentions it but Gareth is a comfortable UK resident lecturing others from afar, like us in the USA on why our Socialist neo-Communist masters are so good for ‘the many’ at the expense of ‘the few’ ( quite curious definition of ‘few’ btw ). So in the spirit of reciprocation let’s all return the favor and suggest our UK brothers and sisters dump the pound, accept the Euro, dissolve parliament and relocate to Brussels, and while they’re at it toss English and adopt French and German as official languages. Wait, what? He might not reject any of those proposals?! Right then, support UKIP, ban all things Euro and outlaw the Socialists. 🙂
It is quite reasonable and logical to implement carbon capture and taxes if the purpose is NOT control of climate, but rather control of who gets the money.
The goal is to assure a nice fat flow of cash to “the right people” and “income redistribution”. Nothing more. Once you realize that; and that much of the rest of the “narrative” is just to give a plausible “story” to the “useful idiots”; then it all makes much more sense…
The profound lack of “logic and reason” is simply testimony to the fact that it isn’t about climate.
The picture below is worth more than 1,000 words. It clearly shows the wasted billions of tax payer dollars to fund these models based on theorized physics represented by using mathematical equations that my 6 year old grand daughter can tell you are wrong by looking at this picture and playing the Sesame Street game: “Which one of these things is not like the others”
The many lines above represent the numerous ensembles of global climate model predictions for temperatures. The dark red and blue lines, all below are real world temperatures based on actual measurements. The models are becoming more and more divergent with reality.
These models are being used to formulate our governments policies, including those outlined in President Obama’s speech last month. Those policies will end up costing us trillions by the time our children are grown up.
Oh, by the way, my grand daughter goes to one of the best schools in Indiana. In her first grade science book this year, she learned that carbon dioxide is pollution and is causing the earth to get too warm and we need to take actions to stop it because it is harming the planet in many ways.
Too bad they don’t teach about the proven law of photosynthesis anymore. At least not regarding the key role that Carbon Dioxide plays and how the increase in CO2 the last 100 years is causing all plants and food crops to grow much bigger.
Mr. Obama stated “And someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they’ll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?”
Since there has been no warming for 15 years and CO2 has provided mostly benefits and is not causing climate change, I contend they will instead look back at this time frame and ask how we let legit science get hijacked by those with political agenda’s and use it to brainwash them and their generation with junk science based on theories that you can see for yourself below, have already been proven dead wrong.
The truth is in this picture/graph.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the-view-from-space/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/
Ian W says:
July 7, 2013 at 10:28 am
….For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible.
Unless the aim is the destruction of US industry and nothing to do with ‘global warming’.
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Of course the aim is to destroy the USA. They came right out and said for gosh sakes!
Obviously this is Obama’s real goal. It is also restated by Pascal Lamy Director General of the World Trade Organization.
I think that Scott Rasmussen nailed it.
In other words the politicians view us as cattle in the same way that the old Aristocracy viewed their serfs. This is why we get nothing but lies and subterfuge. Why over the years we have seen a gradual morphing of our government until we find our lives are ruled by a vast unelected bureaucracy where we do not even have a recourse to the court system for an impartial review. More on the trashing of the USA court system link 1 and link 2
and
China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?
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I believe China and India had a 5000 year head start.
cn
GlynnMhor says:
July 7, 2013 at 9:34 am………………………….
But politicians seem to be a bit slow at the best of times, and it will take another lustrum, or maybe even two, of no warming before the panic stricken carbon strangulation policies we see today are finally reversed.
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Politicians will wait and see how Obama’s policies are received.
A trial balloon. Hell, it’s always election season.
cn