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Based solely on a far-Left agenda that includes a plan to control worldwide energy production, the climate change hysteria movement has jumped the shark. Now our leaders need to start asking tough questions of Al Gore, the United Nations IPCC and other alarmists.
Reducing your carbon footprint in the wake of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was the hottest thing for liberal elites and celebrities alike, but their sell to the American people seems to have gotten stale.
It appears that politicians haven’t lost interest, though. Even though global temperatures stopped rising in 2001 and despite the almost total failure of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the European Union, President-elect Obama continues to make green energy and a new green economy one of his top agenda items. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision that carbon dioxide is indeed a “pollutant”— and its instruction to the EPA that it must decide whether to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act—offers Obama the opportunity to force new and costly carbon emissions regulations on businesses large and small.
Even if the EPA decides not to regulate CO2, the Democrat-controlled Congress will at some point in the next two years be debating legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and set up a mechanism for the trading of carbon emission permits between companies. A massive new government bureaucracy will be formed, and when it comes to something as ethereal as trying to document and limit the amount of carbon dioxide a company is allowed to emit, the opportunities for fraud and gaming the system will be limited only by one’s imagination.
Yet even as our country careens toward government-mandated reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, the scientifi c basis for doing so is gradually eroding away. Our new understanding of how the climate system operates will eventually lead to the realization that what Al Gore likes to call the “climate crisis” has been based upon the greatest scientifi c faux pas in history.