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Charles Krauthammer on Carbon Chastity.
I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’m a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.
But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left. …
David Warren celebrates high oil prices.
… Huge investments are now going into vast petroleum fields discovered offshore Brazil. There are further indications of undersea reserves on that scale from Arctic to Antarctic in all the seven seas. Iraq has been (thanks to the U.S. invasion) methodically prospected at last, and discovered to be lying over oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia. North America sits on numerous grand oilfields, that have hardly been touched (thanks to our friends, the eco cherubs), and Canada is especially smiled on by fortune, for as the oil price rises to levels where they’ll be well worth extracting, our eyes can only glint in reflecting the sparkling treasure of our tar sands.
Those are all reasons in themselves to be happy, and confident about the material future, for they take away all unreasonable fear that the world will run short of carbon fuels, before technological advances obviate our need for them — perhaps in the next century.
It also means that the lock on oil supply which very nasty regimes, such as those which control Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela have been enjoying, must soon crack loose. As in 1973 and 1979, the current high price was inspired by their efforts at extortion through the OPEC cartel (and decidedly not by the oil companies), but will end, as all things end, even in this world, with the spankers spanked. We can further be sure that such regimes, which pride themselves on tactical cunning, are not smart enough to see what’s truly coming in a decade or less, when all the alternative sources start pouring onto the market. Or if they get wiser, God bless them.
Better yet, soaring oil prices are the best possible assurance of clean air and water, for the excess demand creates tremendous pressure to conserve the resource, and use it more efficiently. Indeed, the more profit the large oil companies make (Exxon-Mobil is my personal favourite), the more they can invest in the cleanest high-tech operations — from the pipeheads through the refineries to the oil tankers and depots — for they won’t want to waste a single drop. …
Ed Morrissey on some Kerry comments. And reacts to the news Obama quit his church. And posts on the gaffer.
Corner posts on the church exit.
Amy Holmes – There goes that historic, transcendent, life-changing, not since the Gettysburg Address, “I have a dream,” must-be-taught-in-every-school race speech. It didn’t hold up three months, let alone the time it would take to print up new textbooks. …
Peter Wehner – It’s been just over two months since Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race — the one that was compared by the historian Garry Wills to Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. In that speech Obama famously said he could not more disown the Reverend Jeremiah Wright than he could disown the black community or his own grandmother and spoke about how Trinity United “embodies the black community in its entirely.”
Since that speech Wright has been tossed under the bus — and now, so has Trinity United. …
The Obama Gaffe Machine gets John Fund’s attention.
For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now.
As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him “a one-man gaffe machine.”
Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama’s revised claim, that it was his great uncle who helped liberate Buchenwald. They largely downplayed the error. Yet in another, earlier gaffe back in 2002, Mr. Obama claimed his grandfather knew U.S. troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka – even though only Russian troops entered those concentration camps. …
Mark Steyn says Hillary was beaten by Democrat Party sexism, not Obama.
“Someone wins, someone doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told The Washington Post. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.
How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.
“On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today.”
Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too. …
Roger Simon reacts to the news about the priest Michael Pfleger, and the fact that Obama’s top campaign aide, David Axelrod was due to make a documentary about him.
Dick Morris says for the Clintons …
… Winning is still everything. No matter who gets destroyed, offended or hurt in the process.
We’ve seen it throughout Hillary’s campaign: the race-baiting by Bill Clinton in South Carolina and by Hillary in Kentucky. His comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson and her talk about “hard-working whites” was not accidental. The Clintons don’t make verbal mistakes.
Everything they say is deliberate. And then Bill Clinton actually had the nerve to say that it was the Obama campaign and not him — that they had played the race card. Once again, he’s the victim.
Now Bill and Hillary are desperate to keep Hillary in the race. Despite mathematical impossibility, the Clintons are biding their time. Out of money and out of delegates, they are waiting for some unknown force to suddenly emerge and change the race. That’s why Hillary made the reference to Bobby Kennedy.
Because the Clintons know, better than most people, that time has often been a friend. …
Michael Barone gives a reality check on the economy.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville famously said during the 1992 campaign, when a young Bill Clinton was running against the other President Bush. The same could be said during this presidential campaign. The headlines are full of economic bad news — mortgage foreclosures, the collapse of an investment bank, higher gas and food prices and lower home prices. Voters routinely list the economy as their chief concern, and consumer confidence has sunk to low levels.
Yet at the same time, the economic numbers are not so bad. A recession is defined as two quarters of contraction. But we haven’t had one yet. The gross domestic product has grown, albeit only by 0.6 percent, in the last two quarters. As my U.S. News colleague James Pethokoukis blogged after the most recent numbers came in, “Dude, where’s my recession?” …