As President Obama, the democratic leadership in Congress and their sycophants in the media celebrate the passage of the health-care bill, to the loud disapproval of a majority of the American people, kudos for their seminal achievement are now coming from unlikely places.
One of them is the Chinese top diplomat on global warming, Su Wei. It is not likely that Mr. Wei is impressed by President Obama’s effort to nationalize America’s health care as such. After all, China dismantled its Communist single-payer system nearly three decades ago in favor of a more market-oriented system. Rather, he sees Obama’s victory in ramming through Congress a highly unpopular measure as a hopeful sign that he can do the same with global-warming policy. To encourage that, he just appealed to the EU to increase greenhouse-gas-emission cuts by 30 percent and pressure the U.S. to do the same, while letting developing nations i.e. his own country, continue to spew them as they please.
Unfortunately for Mr. Wei, his appeal to the Europeans is certain to fall on deaf ears. On the day of his rather transparent effort to encourage the West to inflict even greater injury to its competitiveness vis-a-vis China, France abandoned its foolish unilateral promise to fight global warming by raising the tax on a liter of gas by nearly 30 cents. The large European countries will promptly follow suit, which will probably preordain the failure of the next global warming circus in Cancun later this year.
Mr. Wei shouldn’t despair though. With President Obama now having a proven record of disregarding public opinion, Mr. Wei should appeal directly to him to do it again on the even more unpopular cap-and-trade scam, which Obama has already endorsed. It will certainly be the kind of change China and America’s enemies can believe in.
– Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.