by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing \u201ccap-and-trade\u201d legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America\u2019s traditional carbon energy use.<\/p>\n
The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy \u2014 a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil, and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would \u201cnecessarily skyrocket.\u201d His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point even said, \u201cSomehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe\u201d \u2014 that is, about $8\u201310 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement appeared to be a tiny elite attempting to impose costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.<\/p>\n
But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009\u20132010, President Obama never passed into law any global-warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail \u2014 despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.<\/p>\n
So what happened to the global-warming craze?<\/p>\n
Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. \u201cClimategate\u201d \u2014 the unauthorized 2009 release of private emails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom \u2014 revealed that many of the world\u2019s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar-bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, during the last three years \u201cgreen\u201d has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Commonsense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retro-fitted houses, and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.<\/p>\n
Of course, it didn\u2019t help that the world\u2019s most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.<\/p>\n
But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of the theory of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last ten years, \u201cglobal warming\u201d gave way to \u201cclimate change\u201d \u2014 as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.<\/p>\n
Then, when \u201cclimate change\u201d was still not enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: \u201cclimate chaos.\u201d Suddenly some \u201cgreen experts\u201d claimed that even more terrifying disasters \u2014 from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes \u2014 could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.<\/p>\n
Current hard times also explain the demise of global-warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near-nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs \u2014 not whether it\u2019s a more expensive green hybrid model.<\/p>\n
Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.<\/p>\n
While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery \u2014 especially horizontal drilling and fracking \u2014 have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution \u2014 at a time when a struggling US economy is paying nearly half-a-trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands, and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.<\/p>\n
We simply don\u2019t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it has are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.<\/p>\n
\u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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But are such high energy prices good or bad? That should be a stupid question. Yet it is not, when the Obama administration has stopped\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/energy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":877,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/faith-based-energy-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1666,"position":1},"title":"Faith-Based Energy Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 27, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services When the summer driving season starts soon, and tension heats up over Iran, gas may reach $5 a gallon. Nothing bothers voters more than paying an extra $20 or $30 every time they fill up. In times like these, they soon might prefer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/energy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":887,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-gasoline-nightmare\/","url_meta":{"origin":1666,"position":2},"title":"A Gasoline Nightmare","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Obama is barnstorming the west \u2014 blasting oil companies, trying to convince voters that he supports an \u201call of the above\u201d policy, and reminding them that drilling has increased since his tenure. But that won\u2019t work for five reasons. 1) No one believes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/energy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10113,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/apocalyptic-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1666,"position":3},"title":"Apocalyptic Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Instead of overcoming challenges, progressive politicians exploit them to expand government. Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obama\u2019s soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, \u201cYou never let a serious crisis go to waste.\u201d He elaborated: \u201cWhat I mean by that [is] it\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Water"","block_context":{"text":"Water","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/water\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4100,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-sophists\/","url_meta":{"origin":1666,"position":4},"title":"The New Sophists","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 10, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous \"really wise guys\" made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to \"prove\" the most amazing \"thinkery\" that belied common sense. We are living in a new age\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Energy"","block_context":{"text":"Energy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/energy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":739,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/secretaries-gone-wild\/","url_meta":{"origin":1666,"position":5},"title":"Secretaries Gone Wild","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner We\u2019ve had some unusual cabinet secretaries in past administrations \u2014 Earl Butz, John Mitchell, and James Watt come to mind \u2014 but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. 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