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The global climate conspiracists can’t catch a break. Roger Simon comments.
…And speaking of repeating farces, the anthropogenic global warming movement is reaching maybe its hundredth sold-out, standing room only comedic spectacular with the latest news that the purportedly disappearing arctic sea ice is back to “normal” levels after less than a decade. Next the over-breeding polar bears will be invading our cities. …
…If there’s one thing that the AGW debate has shown us it is that our politicians are about as qualified to rule on matters scientific as I am to compete in the pole vault in the 2012 Olympics. …
…But this too is of little importance because the cap-and-trade legislation isn’t about science; it’s about money and control. Anyone the slightest bit interested in science would laugh the whole thing off in twelve seconds. Indeed, the entire environmental movement is verging on becoming an enemy of science itself. But before I go further, let me make clear WE ARE ALL ENVIRONMENTALISTS. And, yes, I’ve broken the unwritten Internet rule and put that in caps because, ironically, it’s very obviousness tells me it has to be emphasized. We all like clean air and water, okay? …
Jonathan Tobin has some amusing commentary on another aspect of the global warming conspiracy.
The supposedly rock-solid consensus among all thinking human beings about the impending catastrophe of global warming has taken another hit from an unlikely villain: your friendly local TV weather forecaster. According to a front-page feature in Monday’s New York Times, some of the biggest global-warming skeptics are precisely those people whom many Americans look to for insight about the weather. The Times reports that a study released this week by George Mason University and the University of Texas reveals that “only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was caused mostly by human activities.” This is very bad news for environmental extremists, since the public seems to trust the weather guys more than Al Gore. …
…For the Times, the problem is primarily one of academic achievement. The climatologists who are promoting fear of global warming—and profiting handsomely from it—are generally affiliated with universities and tend to have advanced degrees whereas many meteorologists do not. For Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who works to promote global-warming hysteria at something called Climate Central, the problem is that the weathermen are just not smart enough to understand her field. Indeed, she says the claim that it will be hotter 50 years from now is as open and shut a case as asserting that August will be warmer than January. But if you think about it, it makes sense that those who work on a day-to-day basis with weather forecasts would have their doubts about computer models about the weather we will get 50 years from now. They know all too well how variable the climate can be and that efforts to project forecasts with certainty, especially those promising apocalyptic disasters, should be taken with a shovel-full of salt. …
In Contentions, Jillian Melchior discusses how the government is responsible for the housing crisis.
Earlier this week, Peter Wallison presented a contrarian speech at the Hudson Institute, New York, detailing how the financial crisis was caused by government policy — not Wall Street greed, or the interconnectedness of financial institutions, or insufficient regulation, or any of the other political scapegoats blamed promiscuously throughout the collapse. (You can find a more detailed, albeit older, version of Wallison’s argument here.) …
…If Wallison is right, the Community Reinvestment Act is a smoking gun, and the hand holding it belongs to Uncle Sam. …
…especially after ObamaCare, angry citizens want specific talking points. And overreaching politicians are as provocative and sinister as any Wall Street demon. Wallison also noted that if the government really wanted to subsidize housing, it should have done so honestly — by putting the funds to do so on the budget. Instead, it chose to coerce financial institutions to do its dirty work. Conservatives need to point to the regulatory causes — the Community Reinvestment Act being one of many examples — and make their case. …
…Wallison’s argument is timely because, as part of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked with exploring the origins of the crisis, he’ll be fighting to present his explanation to Congress on Dec. 15, 2010. He’s outnumbered by Democrats on the commission, who might dominate the written report, in which case his ideas will be presented in dissent. …
Surprise! Peter Schiff has a dim view of things. He says the Fed is creating a government bubble.
… Of course, there will be winners in the government bubble, at least for a while. As was the case with the stock and real estate bubbles, plenty of money will be made by the well-connected and parasitic classes. Government employees will continue to enjoy pay raises at our expense, as will anyone benefiting from the new wave of subsidies, such as Wall Street investment bankers, financial speculators, and those working in health care or education.
These gains will come at the expense of the taxpayers who foot the bill and the consumers who face higher prices. As government grows, it deprives the private sector of the resources it needs to survive and grow. The result is a lower overall standard of living. Not only are government jobs less productive than private sector jobs, but bureaucratic interference actually makes the remaining private sector jobs less efficient as well. …
Mark Steyn writes more about the Obami’s treatment of friends.
…One of the oddest features of the scene is attributed to the president’s “cool,” which seems to be the euphemism of choice for what, in less-stellar executives, would be regarded as an unappealing combination of coldness and self-absorption. I forget which long-ago foreign minister responded to an invitation to lunch with an adversary by saying “I’m not hungry,” but Obama seems to reserve the line for his “friends.” Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk’n'talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone anytime anywhere. Instead, he recoils from all but the most minimal contact with the world.
…One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed “multiculturalist” who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.
Peter Wehner has thoughts on foreign policy after Hillary’s latest.
…Secretary Clinton’s comments were made in the context of the Canadian government’s G8 maternal and child health initiative. According to Clinton: “You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”
So here’s a question: can you imagine Henry Kissinger or Dean Acheson ever saying such a thing? Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State; she’s not the president of Planned Parenthood. And for an administration that insists it shouldn’t meddle in the internal affairs of other nations — unless it means making life considerably more difficult for our allies like Honduras and Israel — this is quite remarkable. …
David Harsanyi opines on Congressman Henry Waxman’s intimidating tactics towards corporations who have reported to the SEC that Obamacare will increase their expenses.
…Some may wonder if Waxman has any lawful grounds to bully anyone into accepting his view of Obamacare. Even if corporations, typically snuggling up to Washington for crony capitalistic favors, had joined in a twisted political conspiracy to make Barack Obama’s legislative masterpiece look as terrible as it is . . . so what? Since when is making a law look bad a criminal act?
The ironic part of Waxman’s abuse of power is that he also demands that CEOs show up with “any documents including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform.”
Would it not be helpful for Congress to first provide taxpayers with any documents — including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by elected officials — regarding this historic health care reform bill? …
In Contentions, Kejda Gjermani is outraged by the next bill that will hurt the economy. Politicians simply have no concept of the damage that they are doing to the economy and the standard of living for normal Americans.
Congress has passed or contemplated so many blunders of late that I, for one, am finding it harder and harder to muster fresh outrage toward every new one. But this latest being cooked up by Chris Dodd deserves a special shout out:
First, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.
All the prerogatives over private businesses; all the power over health care, now near absolute; all the dabbling in the inner workings of financial institutions; in short, all the regulation in the world, cannot seem to satisfy this government. Are the Democrat legislators ever going to have enough? …
Jonah Goldberg thinks there are a couple of political reasons for the flip-flop on drilling.
…Obama justified his decision to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the southern Atlantic and some coastal regions of northern Alaska on the grounds that it would create jobs and serve as a “bridge” to the carbon-free Brigadoon we’ve long been promised. The reality is that his decision was entirely political. Aiming to win vital Republican support in the Senate for some kind of bipartisan cap-and-trade legislation, he lifted the ban where the polling was in favor of doing so. Sound science, energy policy and economics were the last things on his mind. On that, there’s widespread consensus.
Back when oil cost $140 per barrel, President George W. Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling. Once elected, Obama quietly reinstated it. Since then, Obama’s Interior Department has been doing just about everything it can to slow, hamper and prevent oil and gas exploration in the U.S. and offshore. There’s no reason to believe the administration won’t keep doing that. Besides, Obama’s announcement actually bans more promising oil and gas reserves from exploration than it opens up: nothing in the Pacific, nothing in the western Gulf of Mexico, nothing in southern Alaska. …
…And that’s the irony. Obama and his Democratic successors will keep trying to squeeze the rich to pay for their schemes. But that won’t raise anything close to the revenue they need. They’ll try for a value-added tax, which will raise lots of money but also stifle growth. Eventually, if they want to avoid bankruptcy and keep the welfare state afloat, never mind pay for all of these environmental white elephants, they’ll need more revenue, and that’s where oil comes in. …
The Economist explores the coming of wireless power.
…The idea of transmitting power wirelessly has been around since the 1830s when Michael Faraday introduced his celebrated law of induction. Loosely stated, this says that an electrical current in one conductor will induce a current in a second, wholly separate, conductor that shares the same magnetic field. The concept of transmitting power across an air gap between one coil of wire and another led to electrical transformers, generators and motors—and ushered in the era of electrical engineering.
By the 1890s, Nikola Tesla had demonstrated that not just magnetic fields but also electromagnetic waves themselves could transmit power—and over far greater distances. In one experiment, Tesla powered lights in his laboratory grounds remotely from a transmitter coil many metres away. More recently, a government laboratory in Canada built an unmanned aircraft to act as a communications relay station circling 21km up in the sky for months on end. Power was supplied by a microwave transmitter on the ground. A large disc-shaped rectifying antenna attached to the fuselage harvested the microwave energy, turning it into direct current to power an electric motor attached to the plane’s propeller. …
…More down to Earth, several companies have started offering mats and work-surfaces capable of simultaneously recharging a number of portable devices. One of the simplest comes from a firm called WildCharge, based in Colorado. An adaptor is attached to each gadget (often as a specially designed replacement for its back cover) with three lugs on its back for making contact with the charging mat’s conductive surface. Because of the way the mat is configured, at least one lug always makes contact with a positive region of the conductive surface and one with a negative part. Power is transferred to each device by direct contact rather than via a magnetic field and induction. …