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In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a landmark study of mass hysteria and sociopsychosis titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

Mackay painstakingly analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology, and witch crazes.  He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is not only not true, but also potentially deadly.  His answer:

“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”

Conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves—I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words.  How he would have delighted in the strange, self-flagellating notion that is anthropogenic warming.  He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.

In fact, global warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history.  The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations.

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In a previous post here, I noted the major problems with House GOP leadership’s proposal to link revenue from expanded domestic energy production with the Highway Trust Fund in their surface transportation reauthorization legislation. Since then, the three major portions have cleared their respective committees: House Natural Resources approved the drilling proposals, Transportation and Infrastructure passed the primary highway bill, and the revenue link was cleared by Ways and Means. A vote by the full House is expected sometime next week.

Observers expect the bill to fail, not only because there is very little for Democrats to like, but also because principled fiscal conservatives — from our “user-pays” coalition to Heritage Action to Club for Growth to RedState — have all slammed the legislation as a Big Government wolf wrapped in pro-market, pro-growth sheep’s clothing. This proposed bill would continue to federally fund highways at unsustainable levels and fails to address how states are to begin reconstructing their portions of the Interstate system. For instance, it explicitly bans states from tolling existing Interstate segments even for the purpose of reconstruction. Reconstruction to current highway construction guidelines by definition increases capacity, yet the tolling section author(s) apparently didn’t find this additional capacity enhancing enough to justify allowing states to implement an intelligent financing mechanism that can actually pay for the needed investment.

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Mega Star Brad Pitt made a guest appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show this past Wednesday where he made a point to condemn the traditional gas-guzzler with an analogy of his new Academy Award-nominated Moneyball.

Brad explains:  “It (Moneyball) was the story of this small market team that found the game unfair, they could not compete.  They couldn’t buy the talent and if they developed the talent it was poached by the rich team, so what are they going to do to level the playing field?  And these guys started questioning 150 years of baseball knowledge and they started with the question, ‘Just because we’ve been doing it this way for so long, does that mean it’s right?’ I equate it to the automobile, like if we invented the automobile today, would we invent a car, would we say, ‘I know!  We’ll run it on a finite fossil fuel. We’ll export a half a trillion dollars of our GDP.  We’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars on our military to protect that interest, and it will pollute the environment!’ You know, it just doesn’t make sense!”

I give Brad two thumbs, way down, for this elitist tripe.  What celebrities seem to miss is that historically, the introduction of the fossil-fueled automobile has been one of the greatest emancipators, leveling the playing field by lifting many out of poverty through the access of affordable mobility.  In The Best-Laid Plans, Randal O’Toole writes:

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I and several of my CEI colleagues were looking forward to an informal debate late Friday afternoon on energy policy sponsored by McKinsey and Company, the global consulting firm.  As part of their “Drinks and Debate” series, McKinsey’s Washington, DC office invited David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation and Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress’s Climate Progress blog to make some remarks and then take questions from an audience of around 40 people representing all shades of the political spectrum.  It sounded like a lot of fun because Romm often seems enraged and slightly deranged in his frequent blog posts, but unfortunately Romm cancelled at the last minute.  Our host explained that Romm had pulled out without giving a reason and that his side of the debate would be represented by a bottle of Corona Light.  It was still fun: David Kreutzer gave an engaging and stimulating presentation, as he always does, and the bottle of Corona Light proved to be more rational and less misleading than Romm.

Recently, I blogged about EPA’s big mercury lie. In a nutshell, the Agency claims that its ultra-expensive new Mercury and Air Toxics rule is appropriate and necessary in order to protect fetuses from developmental disorders. Yet, according to EPA’s own analysis, the new mercury regulation serves to protect America’s supposed population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who eat 300 pounds of self-caught fish reeled in exclusively from the most polluted bodies of water. To put it another way, this regulation, which costs $10 billion annually, safeguards a population that doesn’t exist.

Already, this ridiculous regulation is killing jobs. Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. last Thursday announced that it would retire six coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland, in order to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule. According to the company, 530 employees will be affected. While FirstEnergy stressed that some workers would be relocated, it is certain that many will lose their jobs.

In the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics rule, EPA has the gumption to claim that the regulation would be a net job creator (see 76 FR 25076). EPA acknowledges that the mercury rule would eliminate jobs at coal-fired power plants, but the Agency believes that more jobs would be created in the emissions control industry. In light of the purposelessness of the Mercury and Air Toxics rule, EPA’s claim that the regulation is a job creator is like saying that it is good economic policy to blow open a hole in the earth with dynamite and then pay people to fill it back in.

President Barack Obama spoke up for the economic interests of the little guy in his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 24th.  On January 26th, the President spoke in Las Vegas about using taxpayer dollars to improve the economic well-being on one of those little guys in particular—Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens.  He urged voters to support the Pickens Payoff Plan (officially titled the NAT GAS Act), a bipartisan bill sponsored in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and in the House by Representative John Sullivan (R-Okla.).

The bill, H. R. 1380 in the House and S. 1863 in the Senate, would provide huge new subsidies to buyers and users of heavy duty trucks that use natural gas.  Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels, which builds and runs natural gas service stations.  He also has major investments in a number of companies in the natural gas industry.  The value of these investments would probably increase by several billion dollars if the bill were enacted.

However, Pickens has been clear that he has spent $100 million “of his own money” to promote the Pickens Your Pocket legislation only out of love for his country.  “I’m sure not doing this for the money,” he told the New York Times last May.

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So much for consensus.

For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.

That was always bunk, of course.  For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it.  There just wouldn’t be any debate.  No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism.  That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.

Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.

(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)

Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).

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