Yes, I am trying to drive traffic these days. Why do you ask?
I can’t help beating up on the president, thanks to his new proclamation on “carbon pollution”—that is to say, pollution that is not pollution—because the new regs the president is pushing are intended to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, which does not pollute the air but rather makes up a significant portion of it. Fortunately, the president will not, for the time being, prohibit us as individuals from emitting carbon dioxide, which, as animals, we do every minute of our lives. The new regs are aimed at power plants, most particularly coal-burners. Democrats pretty much hate coal. They hate coal almost as much as they hate guns. They know they can’t ban guns, so they’re going to ban coal instead. Damn it, there are times when you just have to ban something, or you can’t look at yourself in the mirror in the morning!
The worst thing about the president’s pristine prissiness on the environment—for me, at least—is that it makes me agree with Republicans. Nine-tenths of the time, I can say, “Obama wrong, Republicans wronger,” but on the environment, nu-uh. It’s “Obama wrong, Republicans pretty much right.” I don’t have to agree with the self-willed knuckle-walkers who insist on believing that the earth isn’t getting warm. They’re irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the president is deliberately increasing energy costs (and therefore deliberately decreasing economic growth) by effectively banning what is very often the cheapest energy source (i.e., coal) in pursuit of the self-willed, utterly unnecessary will-o-the-wisp of “innocent energy.” Which is the greater folly, to refuse to believe in global warming (which is largely benign) or to insist on spending hundreds of billions of dollars in a vain attempt to to reverse it?
Afterwords
The New York Times quotes Ted Nordhaus, chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, “an environmental think tank in Oakland, Cal.” on Obama’s proposed regulations: “Is it enough to stop climate change? No. No political leader in the world has a serious agenda to do that.” Because the mere presentation of such a plan would serve as its own refutation. By pushing measures that are both ineffectual and massively expensive, the president is serving us with folly laced with hypocrisy, all blended with the very best of intentions! For the road to Hell is never lacking in paving stones!
