In April of this year, when a student in Turkey asked President Obama how he was different from President Bush, Obama said, “When it comes to climate change, George Bush didn’t believe in climate change. I do believe in climate change, I think it’s important.” In this response, Obama is pointing to a crucial facet in the rhetoric surrounding the climate change debate, which is the rift between those who believe that climate change is a crisis and those who believe that climate change is not a crisis; between those …
Last week Senator Max Baucus joined several mainstream environmentalists in adding pine beetle outbreaks to a long list of things that can be blamed on climate change. As Baucus said in a Congress Quarterly report, Running on the trails by my home in Helena, seeing the red forests destroyed by pine beetles or seeing sustained drought and increased wildfires, we feel the impacts of climate change.”
Proponents of reducing greenhouse gas emissions view the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen as the point of no return. Gordon Brown has famously said that if an agreement is not made in December it will be “irretrievably too late, so we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.” Similarly, COP15’s President, Connie Hedegaard, said that failure in Copenhagen is “not an option” and that the “the sooner we deal with the challenge of climate change, the smaller the risk …
In his speech to the UN on climate change, President Obama warned that the “security and stability of each nation and all peoples—our prosperity, our health, our safety—are in jeopardy” and that “we must seize the opportunity to make Copenhagen a significant step forward in the global fight against climate change.” This message of fighting climate change in order to ensure national security has become a major element of mainstream environmental rhetoric, so much so that many have likened the battle to a full-scale “war.” While examples of this are …
As Americans travel to and from work out of Union Station in Washington DC, they are bombarded with dozens of posters created by Clean Energy Works, an organization that promotes legislation for the expansion of clean energy jobs. The posters lay out what would happen if Congress passes climate change legislation in a very telling way. They communicate short phrases such as: “Our farmers can grow energy in their fields” “Our electricians can install solar panels.”
Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, which premiered last Sunday at The Heritage Foundation and 6,000 other locations in 27 countries, asks some tough questions of Al Gore and his film, An Inconvenient Truth. The title of Gore’s film is telling because it implies that its content is “the truth”: it plays into mainstream environmental rhetoric which claims that the debate as to whether human-created Co2 is warming the planet to a dangerous degree is over and the science is settled. The trailer for …
Well, that depends on what your definition of pollution is. As Senators Boxer and Kerry unveil their cap and trade bill, John Kerry’s recent pitch to the American public is yet another example of how mainstream environmentalists have sought to change the definition of pollution. As Kerry explained last week, the bill is not a “‘cap and trade’ proposal but a ‘pollution reduction’ bill. I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does,’ Kerry said. ‘This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution …
President Obama’s speech to the UN on climate change last Tuesday points to an interesting and fairly recent shift in the left’s environmentalist philosophy: the definition of “pollution” has changed. Even ten years ago, concerns for pollution centered around problems of smog, litter, and toxins in the air and water. However, such concerns for largely visible pollution have been trumped recently by a concern for invisible pollution which Obama claims is the most dangerous of all: “greenhouse gas pollution” and “carbon pollution.” While most visitors to the state of Wyoming …
Spain has spent nearly $30 billion on its green energy economy; each one of these green jobs cost the Spanish government on average $855,000, but the return on investment hasn’t been great. The country’s unemployment rate is not decreasing but rapidly increasing and is now at 19.3%, which is one of the highest in the developed world. In fact, the government’s heavy investments in the solar industry created a bubble than did more to harm to the solar industry than helping it: Though wind power remains the dominant alternative energy …
