Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Stern Words for Global Warming Alarmists
Human Events ^ | 03/10/2009 | Christopher C. Horner

Posted on 03/13/2009 4:50:20 PM PDT by Delacon

Ironies and double standards can be subtle. And, in giddy “historic” times, the ironies can be absolutely blistering. For example, consider the media’s different contortions when covering the positions of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the matter of a “global warming” treaty.

For example, last week the Obama administration proclaimed that expectations shall be lowered on that front and, for some reason, broadcast anchors eschewed rending of cloth and gnashing of teeth, and the print media couldn’t be bothered with the usual editorials and hit pieces masquerading as news items to condemn the seemingly rational assessment.

The words in question came in a speech by President Obama’s “climate envoy,” former Clinton-Gore “Kyoto” aide Todd Stern, that the global warming agenda demanded of Bush was too ambitious and “not going to happen.” (To whom do you present your credentials as “climate envoy”? Mother Nature?)

Well, Stern certainly ruined my day, even if he did unintentionally raise a few questions about some things said back in the campaign. But wait: have faith, oh ye alarmists. The media silence is explained by things not being quite what they seem. More on which in a moment.

Stern’s remarks were covered only by the Wall Street Journal, and even then only described as having been delivered in Washington. In them, Stern even chastised those who might question this judgment with, “We need to be very mindful of what the dictates of science are.”

Oh. Isn’t this the guy whose boss said, within days of being elected, that “[t]he 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 season.”

Why, yes, it is, though of course Obama was either making that up or repeating a threadbare talking point of the crowd terrified of ever subjecting their pet hysteria (and now major revenue source for social engineering) to the acid test of debate.

So, instead of Obama’s climate envoy (I just can’t give up mentioning the title) reliably resorting to Moonbat science, Stern must instead have meant that actual research reveals there’s nothing within reach to replace “fossil fuels.” Hey, we’re a carbon–based economy, guys. Get over it. No matter how hard Al Gore blows, there’s not enough wind power and solar power available (nor will there be for decades, if ever) to provide a significant amount of the electricity America consumes.

That is to say that hopping off the hydrocarbon train now would kill, oh I don’t know, billions. Which actually was the point of a paper in Science magazine in 2002 by, of all people, some leading alarmists (Hoffert, et al.). See, not all of the hysterics hate you for being beautiful.

Of course, regular HUMAN EVENTS readers know that Stern’s resetting of the rhetorical playing field is of a part with establishing new ground rules more accommodating to the new global warming sheriff in our town. The principal change is that of course Obama wouldn't be held to the standard to which Team Global Governance held the Bush administration for eight years: you must sign on to a global warming treaty now or the world will end and you killed it ... and, well, you know the rest if you weren't living on an island somewhere, enjoying a nice warm climate during the Bush-era global cooling.

This does not signal the global governance crowd giving up, of course -- just that they’re happy to let Obama find his own path to the mutually agreed end. U.N. officials have admitted as much, and that the guy therefore needs a break and some room to operate.

According to the U.N.’s chief eco-diplomat Yvo de Boer, Obama is new in office and, besides, his heart's in the right place, we know he'll do the right thing, but of course that Senate's always a problem. Odd, I was fairly attentive to this issue in 2001 after Bush indicated his intention to continue the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking Senate ratification for Kyoto and, um, that’s not the approach you took at the time. I suppose this is “change” de Boer can believe in.

Testing our credulity a bit much, while also in town last week meeting with administration officials, de Boer greeted Stern’s assessment with the Orwellian glee of “we're really happy to see the United States back into the international climate change process.” By telling the world that what they urgently demanded of Bush to save the planet was, well, not in the cards. Got it.

Outside of de Boer, responses by the usual suspects among the green groups and Europeans were muted, consistent with the notion that Obama and they are on the same page.

Now, you may recall similarly nuanced distinctions in how the intellectually dishonest global warming chorus treated, say, both the Clinton-Gore and Bush administrations sneering at the notion of asking the Senate to ratify Kyoto. Now, of course there’s nothing in the Constitution or statute requiring such a request of a signed treaty like Kyoto, but that wasn’t the point. By offering the alms of some lip-biting (his own, this time) and squishy rhetoric, one president was deeply caring and responsible, and the other burned in effigy for somehow setting the planet ablaze.

Stern’s announcement surely will mean the lefties will scramble to find an unoccupied corner on which to protest this move. After all, their comrades have already filled the streets in outrage over his boss, Hillary Clinton, flying to China mere days before to assure them that little things like human rights won’t get in the way of addressing real crises.

What were those real crises far more important than such trifles? Why, the global financial crisis and -- wait for it -- global warming.

Ah. Protest cancelled. Man, these guys and their, for lack of a better word, “reasoning” are the equivalent of that Escher print hanging over the commode in every house party I attended in my 20s. Round and round and round we go. The estimable Mr. de Boer called this high-profile assertion of that hierarchy "a really important and encouraging step."

Less than you demanded of the other guy is actually more. Other than that, nothing is too expensive if incurred in the name of addressing “global warming.” Uh, except debate.

Don’t ask. Being on the vanguard of revolution can be confusing.



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: algore; capandtrade; climatechange; economy; globalwarming; kyoto; msm; obama; socialism; toddstern; worldgovernment
Must read.
1 posted on 03/13/2009 4:50:20 PM PDT by Delacon
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: steelyourfaith; xcamel; neverdem; Tolerance Sucks Rocks

ping


2 posted on 03/13/2009 4:51:03 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon; CygnusXI; Entrepreneur; Defendingliberty; WL-law; Genesis defender; proud_yank; FrPR; ...
 


Global Warming Scam News & Views
Entrepreneur's Compilation of
The Best Global Warming Videos on the Internet

3 posted on 03/13/2009 4:51:28 PM PDT by steelyourfaith (Yo, Washingtonians, the American people called. They DEMAND their country back.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon; OKSooner; honolulugal; Killing Time; Beowulf; Mr. Peabody; RW_Whacko; gruffwolf; ...
Image and video hosting by TinyPic

FReepmail me to get on or off

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Climate Research News

Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown

GREENIE WATCH

Ping me if you find one I've missed.



4 posted on 03/13/2009 4:54:58 PM PDT by xcamel (The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it. - H. L. Mencken)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: NewJerseyJoe

ping for later


5 posted on 03/13/2009 5:01:12 PM PDT by NewJerseyJoe (Rat mantra: "Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

Marking while I go to the bathroom to hurl. The press is our enemy...


6 posted on 03/13/2009 5:03:23 PM PDT by tubebender (99% of Lawyers give the rest a bad name...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

Moonbat science


7 posted on 03/13/2009 5:07:23 PM PDT by dennisw (0bomo the subprime president)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

This was predictable.

A real attempt to cut emissions as much as Gore and Hansen want, while requiring none at all from China, India, and Mexico—this would destroy the Democratic Party for generations, politically.


8 posted on 03/13/2009 5:07:39 PM PDT by denydenydeny ("I'm sure this goes against everything youÂ’ve been taught, but right and wrong do exist"-Dr House)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon
Photobucket
9 posted on 03/13/2009 5:09:04 PM PDT by oyez (People! You're being pimped!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: All

We Don’ Need No Stinkin’ Treaty!   [Chris Horner]

At Heartland’s International Climate Change Conference in New York this week, I gave a talk addressing the argument made by Brookings’s Nigel Purvis that, when it comes to roping the U.S. into Kyoto’s successor, we need to recognize that “The United States should classify new international treaties to protect the Earth’s climate system as executive agreements rather than treaties,” because “The treaty clause has never worked as the framers of the Constitution intended.”

 

By that he means, upon clarification, that “The treaty process created by the framers of the Constitution requires an exceptional degree of national consensus that is no longer reasonable given the frequency and importance of international cooperation today,” meaning that which was intended to keep us from doing something too promiscuously has been overtaken by the practice of doing it too promiscuously and must be thrown overboard.

 

Kyoto II therefore should just be an executive agreement requiring 50-plus-1 “fast tracking” in both houses of Congress, not two-thirds Senate ratification.

 

Now, to be accurate and in apology to the tremendous audience which packed the room for our panel, in my haste to pull up the file and remove from it a few slides that I saw being covered by Marc Morano speaking before me, I actually gave a version of my eight-minute CPAC talk the week before — the correct, more in-depth treatment of the issue is the version which will be posted.

 

This talk tracked a piece I had in the Federalist Society’s Engage in February.

 

I have had Kyotophiles raise their hands the moment I raise this issue, aah-aah-aah! a la Seinfeld’s Kramer, firmly instructing me that no one is really thinking about such things don’t raise them don’t raise them I don’t hear you, etc.

 

As that could indicate, this isn’t an issue that they find helpful to raise in advance of whatever’s going to be done.

 

So it is with interest that I read a paper for Team Soros that the Center for American Progress sent to me titled “A Changing Climate: The Road Ahead for the United States,” making the same points made by Purvis, offering the same prescription and on the same grounds of restoring our credibility and so on.

 

It’s full of pap about the U.S. having muzzled its scientists, cites John Holdren for propositions of a catastrophically warming world, yadda, yadda — but is most intriguing for this:

The United States’ own ratification process meanwhile presents special challenges. Ratifying a treaty is much tougher than passing domestic legisla­tion, both because the Senate is classically hostile to requirements imposed by outside bodies such as the UN and because it requires 67 votes rather than the 51 required for domestic legislation or even the 60 required to break a filibuster. Even if a U.S. domestic cap-and-trade system were enacted, ratifying a treaty could be difficult, especially if the treaty required changes to elements of the domestic system, as it well might.

The obvious solution in the face of such meanies adhering to the Constitution and getting in the way when you’ve got a revolution to carry out is the congressional-executive agreement suggested by Purvis. The authors? “Todd Stern . . . senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a partner at WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. [and] William Antholis . . . managing director of the Brookings Institution.”

 

Stern is of course the new “climate envoy” for the United States, the apparent voice of reason downplaying the idea of U.S. involvement in some grand Kyoto 2.0 treaty (credit for which apparent realism I give him in a Human Events piece from yesterday).

 

So it’s unclear which Stern is at work, but at least we do know that he, too, harbors aspirations of finding an end-run around the Constitution’s troublesome two-thirds Senate-approval requirement. It’s pretty clear that this is in fact the Party Line. Maybe it’s OK to talk about it now?


10 posted on 03/13/2009 5:17:40 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

“Hey, we’re a carbon–based economy, guys. Get over it.”

More than that, we are carbon based life forms. To reject that basic premise illustrates the sheer insanity of the “Climate Moonbats”.


11 posted on 03/13/2009 5:20:17 PM PDT by headstamp 2 ("Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

Global warmers should LOVE GW Bush. Under Bush we had 8 solid years of cooling reversing the warming trend that was going to destroy the earth. GW Bush is a Super Hero!


12 posted on 03/13/2009 5:45:32 PM PDT by Always Right (Obama: more arrogant than Bill Clinton, more naive than Jimmy Carter, and more liberal than LBJ.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

Nice read. Love the reference to the “...Escher print hanging over the commode...” Heh.


13 posted on 03/13/2009 5:54:13 PM PDT by richlk
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: richlk

Hey if you didn’t have an Escher hanging in you room then you weren’t a thinking and complex person.


14 posted on 03/13/2009 6:16:14 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

With the stuff I was smokin’ back then, a good portion of my life resembled an Escher print.


15 posted on 03/13/2009 6:28:00 PM PDT by Stosh
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

If this guy does more flip flops he’ll be speaking at the republican convention.


16 posted on 03/13/2009 6:44:30 PM PDT by nufsed
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

I have a feeling that any honest debate of cap and trade in Congress would see the plan nixed in a hurry as Congress critters who vote to impose this massive tax increase my soon find themselves voted out of office. The only way the Reid/Pelosi/Obama cabal can get this through is by hiding in the pork pile.


17 posted on 03/13/2009 7:33:55 PM PDT by The Great RJ ("Mir we bleiwen wat mir sin" or "We want to remain what we are." ..Luxembourg motto)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

thanks, bfl


18 posted on 03/13/2009 11:49:02 PM PDT by neverdem (Xin loi minh oi)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: AdmSmith; Berosus; Convert from ECUSA; dervish; Ernest_at_the_Beach; Fred Nerks; george76; ...

[snip] consider the media’s different contortions when covering the positions of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the matter of a “global warming” treaty. For example, last week the Obama administration proclaimed that expectations shall be lowered on that front and, for some reason, broadcast anchors eschewed rending of cloth and gnashing of teeth, and the print media couldn’t be bothered with the usual editorials and hit pieces masquerading as news items to condemn the seemingly rational assessment. The words in question came in a speech by President Obama’s “climate envoy,” former Clinton-Gore “Kyoto” aide Todd Stern, that the global warming agenda demanded of Bush was too ambitious and “not going to happen.” (To whom do you present your credentials as “climate envoy”? Mother Nature?) [end]

thanks neverdem.

Global warming or global cooling?
Victorville Daily Press | March 13, 2009 | FROM STAFF REPORTS
Posted on 03/13/2009 8:30:09 PM PDT by neverdem
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206313/posts

Low solar activity continues
Coeur d’Alene Press | Mar 08, 2009 | Cliff Harris & Randy Mann
Posted on 03/13/2009 8:55:36 PM PDT by neverdem
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2206320/posts


19 posted on 03/14/2009 5:33:36 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/____________________ Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Delacon

Stern is an arrogant fool and a left-wing poltroon. Then again, all leftists are poltroons. There will be a day of reckoning for all of them, and we the people will prevail.


20 posted on 03/27/2009 9:32:22 PM PDT by BanLibDems
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson