Poor President Obama! When he murders innocent kids in Central Asia, I attack him. When he cancels overly restrictive regulations of ozone and promotes a pipeline to bring Canadian oil to the U.S. to fuel our economy, Ralph Nader attacks him. Yes, Ralph Nader, the guy who gave us Dub-Ya, is still talking, still bitching, and still being the pain in the ass that he’s always been.
Obama has no one to blame for this one than himself. He bit, as heavily as anyone, into the environmentalist fantasy that blossomed during the heyday of Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth.” Well, Al still has his Nobel, but that’s about all he has, and the cause of environmentalism has gone down even faster than Big Al. Even in the best of economic times, the idea that we could switch from “bad” oil and gas and coal to “good” wind and solar (plus the ever-popular “switch” grass—even Dub-Ya liked that shit) without adding a couple of percentage points to the unemployment rate—and without affecting global warming by more than a tenth of a percentage point, as India and China and the rest of the world continued to pursue their shocking goal of living the way we do—well, even with all of that, the environmental fantasy was just that, a fantasy, worth maybe ten to twenty billion a year in feel-good, walk-around money. But with brutally high unemployment projections continuing as far as the eye can see, it’s time for environmentalists to grow up. We need growth, not fairy tales. Obama has gotten with the program, pretty much, even though he basically hates it. Hell, he’d love to be planting switch grass, and cranking up a dozen giga-watt, bird-slaughtering wind farms, but he’s starting to realize that it’s all bullshit. Ralph Nader, obviously, is never going to grow up. But do you really want to be as big a douche as Ralph Nader? (I’m hoping that will work, but it probably won’t.)
AfterwordsI’ve previously highlighted Barack “Bang Bang” Obama’s war crimes here. Jim Manzi explains (several times, actually) why it’s very, very unlikely that global warming will cook our asses here.
