DEMOCRATS BLAME PRESIDENT FOR EXTREME HURRICANES
by David Sisler
If I close my eyes and think back in time, I can remember the debates, and I can hear Ronald Reagan say about Jimmy Carter, “Well, there he goes again!”
Yesterday with tongue firmly in cheek, I said that the Democrats were blaming President George W. Bush for everything from blowing up the Hindenburg, to causing the blizzards of 1888 and 1996.
I was joking.
MoveOn.org, a front organization for the Democratic party and its candidate John Kerry, is not joking. In an email to their supporters, they stated last week that President Bush is to blame for “making extreme weather stronger.”
I am not making this one up!
President Bush is to blame for the 2004 hurricane season they say, because the President “walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, the only major international treaty to curb global warming pollution.”
Global warming, they say, is the cause of the hurricanes, and President Bush is the cause of global warming. There certainly is a lot of hot air in this election, and unrecognized by MoveOn.org, most of it is coming from them. Chicken Little has competition.
Let’s take a look at the Kyoto Protocol, which the Clinton Administration backed in 1997, and which the Bush Administration, correctly, has repudiated.
As Paul Harvey would say, I am going to tell you more than I know. And to do that, I am going to lean heavily on the work of Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.
This is not an easy read, but stay with me.
The Cato Institute was founded as a non-profit public policy research foundation which “seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace.” On its website, www.cato.org, the organization calls itself a “liberal” think tank, following Jeffersonian philosophy which they call “libertarianism” or “market liberalism.”
One more quote: “Market liberals have a cosmopolitan, inclusive vision for society. We reject the bashing of gays, Japan, rich people, and immigrants that contemporary liberals and conservatives seem to think addresses society’s problems. We applaud the liberation of blacks and women from the statist restrictions that for so long kept them out of the economic mainstream. Our greatest challenge today is to extend the promise of political freedom and economic opportunity to those who are still denied it, in our own country and around the world.”
I belabor their identity so that it becomes obvious that they are not part of a “right wing conspiracy” (a popular epithet – and excuse – bandied about by members of the Democratic party).
As part of the Kyoto Protocol, the United States set the goal of reducing its emissions of greenhouse gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels. Because it de-emphasizes the use of fossil fuel, the Kyoto agreement – if fully complied with – would likely reduce the gross domestic product of the United States, Professor Michaels says, “by 2.3 percent per year.”
“However,” Professor Michaels says, “according to a climate model of the National Center for Atmospheric Research recently featured in Science, the Kyoto emission-control commitments would reduce mean planetary warming by a mere 0.19 degree Celsius over the next 50 years. If the costs of preventing additional warming were to remain constant, the Kyoto Protocol would cost a remarkable 12 percent of GDP per degree of warming prevented annually over a 50-year period.”
Here it is. It will take 50 years to reduce global warming by one-fifth degree Celsius. Professor Michaels says that regular temperature sensing devices could probably not even detect that puny amount. But it will cost our nation more than one trillion dollars per year for 50 years (based on the 2003 GDP) to achieve that insignificant temperature savings!
In actuality, to achieve that savings, the entire industrial world will have to achieve the same degree of pollution control as the United States – and that will not happen. China, India, Australia, and the developing Pacific Rim, nations that will be responsible for more than 25 percent of all greenhouse emissions by 2010 are not committed to any reductions.
To achieve that 7 percent reduction in emission levels, we would have to reach roughly the level of pollution we produced in 1979. Professor Michaels says that to do that, the lights in approximately 80 percent of homes in America would have to be turned off – and that assumes that electrical lighting becomes 20 percent more efficient over this period.
To meet the Kyoto mandate the corporate average fuel economy of new cars would have to be approximately 60 mpg.
The Kyoto Protocol was signed seven years ago. If everything worked in perfect harmony we would not reach the one-fifth degree of savings for another 43 years, but we would spend more than $50 trillion to do it.
There is one more thing you need to know about Patrick J. Michaels and his policy analysis, “The Consequences of Kyoto.” It was published in May, 1998 – a mere five months after the Clinton White House agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, and more than two years before George W. Bush won the presidency.
Those are the facts which MoveOn.org ignores when they say that the President is responsible for the current hurricane season. They are soliciting a “letter to the editor campaign” so that the ignorant among us will know that Jeanne and Ivan and their kin were caused by President Bush. Unmoved by facts, unmoved by the sheer lunacy of their position, they are urging their constituents to “get the word out of how dangerous weather is connected to the occupant of the White House.”
There is a growing danger to our nation. It is the body of lies which continue to be told by MoveOn.org and the standard bearers for the Democratic National Party.
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Copyright 2004 by David Sisler. All Rights Reserved.
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