Today, one of the most foolish pieces of legislation in American history comes up for a vote in the House – the Waxman-Markey Energy Bill (HR 2454), otherwise known as ‘Cap and Trade’.
This monstrosity would cripple our economy and place us at a serious competitive disadvantage in world markets – and for what? The bill is a ’solution’ to a problem that doesn’t exist. The ’science’ behind global warming is widely viewed as a joke at home and abroad, so much so that Nancy Pelosi has warned Al Gore to stay in Tennessee during the vote.
As Kimberly Strassel observes in today’s Wall Street Journal, most of the rest of world – increasingly convinced by the ’skeptics’ so derided by Gore and Company – is running away from draconian climate legislation.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S. . . .
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
I suppose we should take comfort that this is just the House vote. The competing Senate bill – sponsored by Joe Lieberman and John Warner – is quite a different animal, although no less destructive. We can only hope that a collision of the two bills results in mutual destruction or a mass public mobilization against the whole idea.
Of all the days to die, why did Michael Jackson pick yesterday? Now Waxman-Markey is even further below the radar than it already was. Damned inconsiderate.
UPDATE: The Competitive Enterprise Institute has released an internal EPA report suppressed by EPA bureaucrats because it criticized the outdated ’science’ used by the agency to formulate global warming and climate change policy.
Hat tip on the report to Michelle Malkin.
