The global warming party is over:
Who now remembers Smoot-Hawley, Quemoy and Matsu, and the Teapot Dome? But these were once issues on which the survival of the known world rested. The only global-warming news of this week was the announcement that the House Select Committee on Global Warming would die with the 111th Congress. Mrs. Pelosi established the committee three years ago to beat the eardrums of one and all, a platform for endless argle-bargle about the causes and effects of climate change. The result was the proposed job-killing national energy tax, but with the Republican sweep, there’s no longer an appetite for killing jobs.
Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the doomed committee, organized one final event this week, a splashy daylong exercise in gasbaggery starring the usual suspects assigned to drone on for most of the day about the coming global-warming disasters, the melting of the North Pole and the rising of the seas that would make Denver, Omaha and Kansas City seaside resorts. Wesley Clark was the only former presidential candidate to accept an invitation, and he was a no-show. The star witness of the afternoon session was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an “environmental attorney” who talked about how “clean energy” is nicer than the other kind. Mr. Markey himself, as bored as everyone else, didn’t bother to return after lunch.
The members of the committee can now retire with their scrapbooks of clippings to recall the happy days of hearings about global warming (some of them before “global warming” became “climate change” and “liberals” became “progressives”), about how clean energy could replace smelly oil wells and provide Democrats with the means to enact sweeping climate-change legislation. Who could have foreseen that the only “sweeping” would be the sweeping out of so many Democrats?
Well, actually, absent massive voter fraud, it was pretty much inevitable.
[Afternoon update]
Some interesting climate-related Wikileaks, with a promise of more to come. I wonder how Assange feels about having exposed these corrupt con artists?
I like the way anybody making over $250K is a “billionaire”.
$1B/$250k/yr = 4000 yrs. I suppose it’s nice that they’re so optimistic about life extension. ;^)
Well, maybe they’re expecting inflation. I know I am.
Wow I could live to see the turn of the next millennium. I bet by that time Andrew Sullivan will still be demanding Senator Trig Palin to fork over a DNA sample.
About wikileaks: the way to destroy it is to send Assange false leaks, then expose the leaks as fraudulent. He has no way to verify the veracity of his sources.
I wonder how Assange feels about having exposed these corrupt con artists?
Assange is out there now claiming that he broke the Climategate emails on Wikileaks which is a bald faced lie.
Methinks that he is getting a bit full of himself.
You, sir, have a gift for understatement that borders on British.
“I wonder how Assange feels about having exposed these corrupt con artists?” So who whacks him – the Russians, or the Earth First! gang? Does whoever does it set it up to make it look like the other did? Or does a third party step in before either of those two? I know, it’s all very conspiratorial, maybe a little whacky, but who’s to say it can’t possibly happen.
Anyone who thinks the Smoot-Hawley Tariff is an appropriate example of irrelevant dustbin-of-history material – in the current climate of Great Depression economic paranoia and New Deal nostalgia – isn’t qualified to write advertising copy, let alone news analysis.