Sunday, December 7, 2008
How Obama and the Democrats will Destroy the U.S. Economy
GreeenIsm piece by
Alan Caruba
When I heard President-elect Obama speak casually of “bankrupting” the coal industry because of its role as a source of greenhouse gas emissions, I knew that he would become a serious threat to the economy of the nation.
Given that the economy has been seriously threatened by the financial crisis, Obama has acted quickly to surround himself with people tasked to restore trust and confidence to our banking system. The ad hoc approach of the current Secretary of the Treasury will hopefully yield to a more reasoned effort, but it is clearly one in which the government will inject huge amounts of money into the system to give it, in Obama’s words, “a jolt.”
Obama enters the Oval Office as perhaps the President who is most committed to the murderous objectives of the environmental movement that took root and have expanded since the 1960s. It is instructive that its impetus was “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, a screed against DDT and all chemicals that protect and enhance the lives of human beings, crops and property. The “facts” put forth in her book have long since been exposed as lies and the result of those lies has been the needless death of millions from diseases such as malaria. Here in the United States, cases of West Nile Fever would be greatly reduced were DDT permitted to control the mosquito population.
In a comparable fashion, every “fact” put forth by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Fact” has been demonstrated to be false.
Here are Obama’s words: “Few challenges facing American and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane seasons. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.”
Every single word of this statement is false in whole or in part.
To begin with, there is no problem with regard to climate change, a term adopted by environmentalists as the public becomes more and more aware that there was and is not dramatic global warming. Indeed, the world is now into a cycle of global cooling that has been in effect since around 1998. A number of solar scientists are predicting we are in for at least fifty years of global cooling and its effects will be far more destructive to modern societies than any fictitious warming.
Nothing, absolutely nothing should be done to deal with a non-existent global warming. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and climate changes have occurred throughout all that time. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years and the Industrial Revolution began just over two hundred years ago. In the process, the ordinary lives of humans have been extended and enhanced in ways that were unimaginable even in my youth.
Briefly, the sea levels during the twentieth century rose worldwide by less than eight inches, nor are the coastlines “shrinking.” Obama is engaging in scare mongering by saying that there has been record drought. There were far worse U.S. droughts in the early part of the last century. Even the intentionally flawed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns against attributing droughts or floods to “global warming.” The natural cycles of hurricanes are well known and attributing more of them to “global warming” is utterly false.
The worst and most dangerous aspect of Obama’s objectives is the imposition of limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the name of ending a “global warming” that is not happening. Cutting 80-90% of U.S. carbon emissions would result in the closing of a comparable amount of U.S. industries. It would so weaken the U.S. economy that it would render it a Third World nation. The European Union nations that agreed to such reductions via the Kyoto Protocol are seeking to alter or end these commitments.
Imposing “cap-and-trade” of emissions or a “carbon tax” will eviscerate the U.S. economy. The notion that the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide is absurd and the justification, if this goes into effect, will be the lies promulgated by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change. As Sarah Liddy Bourne, vice president for policy and strategic development of The Heartland Institute, points out, the IPCC “include staffers of such activist groups as Greenpeace, Environmental Defense, and Environment Canada.” Not exactly the most neutral people on this critical topic.
Obama’s promise of 2.5 million new jobs based on “sustainable” energy such as solar and wind turbine use, the increase of ethanol production, and other mandates is utterly baseless as these steps ignore the fact that the nation and its economy is totally dependent on the use of oil, natural gas, coal, hydroelectric and nuclear for its energy requirements. Neither the solar or wind industries would exist without significant government subsidies and support.
Requiring Detroit to produce hybrid automobiles that no one wants to buy and which are far more expensive that gasoline-powered models will kill its auto industry. The batteries required add an average of $8,000 to the cost of these vehicles that get barely 45 miles per charge and must be recharged overnight, running up the owner’s electricity bill.
As the Viscount Monckton of Brenchly, a noted British scientist, has pointed out, the rise in the real cost of “biofuels” such as ethanol has already led to food riots in poor countries and the consequence of such a policy would be mass starvation. He has deemed global warming and environmentally-based energy mandates as “purposeless and cruel.”
“To let politicians insert data into official scientific documents; to alter those documents so as to contradict scientific findings; to manipulate decimal points so as to engender false headlines by exaggerating tenfold—those are moral issues,” says Lord Monckton.
He went on to rebuke statements like Obama’s, saying “To claim scientific unanimity where none exists; to assert that catastrophe is likely when nearly all scientists do not; to exalt computer models over real-world observations; to misstate the conclusions of scientific papers or that meaning of observed data; to overstate the likely future course of climatic phenomena by several orders of magnitude—these are moral issues.”
They are also critical economic issues.
We are on the brink of a term of office by President-elect Obama and by the U.S. Congress that puts everyone at extreme risk and which, if these false assertions are enacted as the law of the land, will utterly destroy the economy, leaving everyone vulnerable to energy and food losses on a scale few can imagine.
Alan Caruba
HowardWasRight 
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