Reuters wrote a piece the other day with a statement that struck me as odd: “Global warming has become a key issue in the race for the White House.” I had missed that, and Reuters’ evidence betrayed the theory: it is an issue because “the top candidates in both political parties seek . . . to put a cap on greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures.”
Back in the day, political issues arose when candidates disagreed.
The piece also contained another great debate-that-isn’t line. “ ‘The debate is between the carbon tax and cap and trade,’ [Sen. John McCain] said. ‘I will do whatever I can to get consensus on cap and trade legislation.’ ” I confess that I am unaware of any recognizable political movement to impose a carbon tax, with politicians instead huddling safely around the fire of the less menacing cap-and-trade scheme . . . which the Congressional Budget Office nonetheless calls an (inefficient) energy tax. But crusader McCain will doubtless use a costly cap-and-trade bill to beat back the straw-man hordes of carbon taxers.
McCain’s fellow presidential candidate Barack Obama is another global-warming action hero. At a rally in College Park, MD, this week, Obama seized the mantle of “hopemonger,” in contrast to those other “mongers” out there. He then proceeded, through three separate stanzas about global warming, to reveal he is also a warmmonger. Apparently, climate change is yet another “change we can believe in.”
For someone who pitches himself as a sainted outsider determined to bring revelatory change to our national politics, Obama’s prescriptions sure sound like tired old inside-the-Beltway nostrums — foretelling impending disaster that only various governmental interventions in the economy can mitigate.
One of his money lines was “we are going to spend billions of dollars on solar, wind, and biodiesel.” Yes. It’s criminal that we haven’t done that yet.
The details of how those billions would be spent were less amusing: “We will hire young people who don’t have a trade and give them a trade making homes more energy efficient, insulating homes, changing light bulbs, reducing our dependence on dirty power plants.” So, the idealistic, modern-day version of the “ask not what your country can do for you” consists of telling slackers that the government will provide windmill and lightbulb-changing jobs after graduation?
That’s not Camelot; it’s the New Deal.
Oddly enough, global warming alarmism never took hold during the 1930s — though it was warmer in the 1930s than it is today.