2008

What’s true in athletics is also true with energy production: You can’t get good results if you don’t do the drills.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

In Durham, N.C. our state Blue Cross and Blue Shield is boasting about the groundbreaking of a new "100,000-square-foot building that will use 65 percent less energy and half the water per square foot of typical office space." Good for them, if it improves their bottom line, efficiency, service to customers, whatever.

But the director of our State Energy Office, Larry Shirley, was excited as well, although for different reasons:

"If North Carolina were a country, it would be the 24th biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world," he said. "If we just have a one-foot level rise in sea level, it would devastate eastern North Carolina. We're very vulnerable. The only state more vulnerable is Florida."

It's not clear whether Shirley was even asked about global warming, but as we often see, in many instances it doesn't matter what the question is, because the answer will always be global warming.

I'm always amused by the alarmists' "if (insert state name) were a country…" argument and the computer-modelized "if we have (insert disastrous measurement)" argument. Why can't we ask the reverse questions, like "what if the EU countries, or even China and India, were states?" Where would North Carolina rank then?

What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub? What if Superman grew up in Germany?

Hat tip to my colleague Paul Messino. 

In the past few months, France, Italy, and the 27-nation European Union have separately threatened a trade war against the U.S. to stem ongoing damage to Europe’s competitiveness. This came amid cries for an end to the economic hemorrhaging from the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries, automakers, aluminum producers, and others.

Today’s announcement by President Bush on strategies to limit global warming has yet to come, but unless he is ready to unveil a new and miraculous source of energy that produces no carbon dioxide, one can only assume that he will simply be adding his voice to the many other lemmings who are calling for a mass migration to the nearest cliff from which we can all jump. The fact is that there is simply nothing we can do — short of shutting down the global economy — that will substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

We are all global-warming alarmists now. President Bush's speech yesterday outlining the goal of halting the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States by 2025 runs the unusual gauntlet of promising something the private sector will probably deliver on its own — witness the spontaneous rise of "carbon offsets" and green investing — while also kicking the intellectual legs out from under a defensible conservative position on climate change.

So, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) weighed in among the rest in today’s news with his take on President Bush’s strange foray back into the hyper-politicized “global warming” debate, with an even stranger comment.

It seems that Congress – the legislature, mind you – really can’t act on legislation addressing this issue that they really want to act on…really…until the Executive sends them legislation.

Of course, this is how the European Constitu…wait, not allowed to say that…European rules of operation work. The executive, or Commission, proposes legislation to the European Parliament, which of course isn’t allowed to draft such things. They just approve them (and if they disapprove of them, in now-classic EU fashion as the Irish and Danes can tell you better than most, they keep voting until they get the answer right).

As you ponder this newest European export to the US, on top of those steel jobs piling up in Kentucky and now Alabama, I’m going to ask you all to roll up your sleeves and drill down into the depths of the Constitution. Say, Article I, and, uh, Section 1:

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Today, calls for America to become “energy independent” come from across the political spectrum. Among the most important energy-security advocates are conservatives concerned about national security. To make America less “dependent” on energy purchases from unstable regimes, they have proposed a variety of measures aimed at reducing the use of oil. However, rather than make the nation more secure, the proposed measures have the potential to inflict significant economic damage on America, weakening it at a time when national security demands strong economic resilience.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

I like how Roy Spencer characterizes this modern-day dastardly criminal:

And all of this assumes that mankind is the primary cause of global warming anyway. You might be surprised to learn that there has never been a single scientific paper published which has ruled out natural climate variability for most of our current global-mean warmth. Not one.

Instead, since Mr. Carbon Dioxide was found at the scene of the crime — albeit without the murder weapon — there is no need to search for any other culprits or accomplices. The circumstantial evidence has convicted him. Even though Mr. Carbon Dioxide is necessary for life on Earth, we are now calling him derogatory names, like “pollutant.”

I guess you could call Mr. C.D. the reincarnation of Richard Jewell.