There hasn’t been much evidence of “global warming” for at least 15 years. If anything, “cooling” has kicked in as part of an eternal cycle that stretches back through history. But President Obama is not one to let the facts stand in the way of a beautiful theory. Especially when it rallies his restive liberal base.
During (what else?) a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, Obama announced that he’ll use his favorite leadership tool, executive orders, and the powers of the unelected, Nixon-era Environmental Protection Agency to end-run Congress and crack down on one of his favorite whipping boys, coal. All in the name of fighting the phantom menace of climate change and in particular carbon emissions.
As usual, the president demanded immediate action. “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” he sneered. “The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it.” And anyone who disagrees with him is a “denier.”
As he’s been for years, Obama is fixated on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” as a major source of air pollution and thus (to hear him tell it) warming. Meanwhile, scientists who once proclaimed environmental Armageddon with absolute certainty (the science was “settled”) now can’t match their doomsday models to what’s happening — which is basically nothing. “The practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on,” wrote The New York Times this month. “They admit that they do not.”
But that won’t stop Obama from trying to hamstring the coal industry and coal-fired power plants. Still reeling from the prolonged Great Recession, Big Coal (not to mention the jobs it supports) now must brace itself for a new onslaught from the EPA.
At the same time, other measures heading down the pike are meant to encourage “clean energy” from wind and solar, heightened efficiency standards for appliances, automobiles and new buildings and — hold on to your hat — infrastructure improvements to deal with the fantasized effects of future warming.
All this will drive up energy costs, as Obama vowed in ’08: “Under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Expect another army of bureaucratic monitors, too.
Naturally, the leader of the environ-kook brigade, Al Gore, was all smiles. “I applaud the new measures,” said the ex-vice president, who’s made a fortune as a “warming” fear-monger.
Siccing the EPA on corporate villains was a clear play for the “progressive” base, for whom “climate change” has the force of religious dogma. Frustrated by Congress’s refusal to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2010, Obama grasped the fig leaf provided him by the Supreme Court in 2007, when it ruled that the EPA can “regulate” (meaning “restrict”) greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Can gas and oil be far behind?
“Stroke of the pen, law of the land — kinda cool,” said ex-Clinton adviser Paul Begala in 1998, referring to executive orders. Clinton used them liberally, but Obama has made them the hallmark of his governing style; disinclined by talent and temperament to horse-trade with ideological opponents, the president prefers the “kinda cool” approach to enact significant aspects of his legislative agenda.
Whether that’s in the spirit of the Constitution, however, is another matter. Since FDR and the New Deal, the legislative branch has effectively been usurped by a continuously metastasizing federal bureaucracy controlled by the executive branch, and about the only thing Congress can do to rein it in is cut off its funding.
And that, of course, will never happen.