When the President of the United States acts to raise energy costs by limiting commercial supply, he should provide more than a gesture as a reason for sacrifice. Yet a gesture is all Barack Obama could offer in his June 25 speech at Georgetown University on climate change.
After cycling through unnecessary reminders that US weather has been hot, the president resorted to this canard of climate-change activism: "So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science—of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements—has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it."
Evading the question
This is distortion. Some of it is simply false. The often-cited 97% figure, for example, doesn't relate to all scientists, as Obama stated. It appeared in a recently reported review of 12,000 abstracts of articles about climate change. Of the 33% of those abstracts offering an opinion, 97% were reported—some questionably—to have affirmed that human activity drives climate change. That 67% of the abstracts offered no opinion is a clear expression of doubt. But findings weren't reported that way, certainly not by the president.
Obama employed deception to evade a question able to puncture activists' climate agenda. The facts of past warming and a human contribution to it are not at issue. Activists pretend otherwise because it's easier to disparage questioners for denying received wisdom than it is to address the questions honestly.
The pointed question is this: What can people really do about observed warming?
People can, as Obama insisted, "act." They can be forced to replace cheap fossil energy with expensive forms that emit less carbon dioxide and suffer the economic consequences. But will doing so change globally averaged temperature? It won't if the effort confines itself to the developed world. It might not affect temperature meaningfully even if the effort could be expanded to global proportions, which it can't. Disparity between the temperature record and model predictions suggest the human contribution to observed warming isn't as great as activists assert. If people aren't warming the planet much in relation to influences outside their control, they can't cool it much, either.
When the president insists "we need to act," Americans should ask why and demand better and more honest answers than they've received so far.
Obama's new call to action on climate change pushes beyond initiatives he made explicit at Georgetown. Those moves are bad enough. Among other things, they put crippling new restrictions on coal-fired generation of electricity, promise further delays in approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and call for increased taxation of the oil and gas industry.
Energy fanaticism
More ominous is how the package advances energy fanaticism promoted by groups on the political fringe that happen to be crucial to Democratic Party funding. Obama, the former activist, needs the activists. And they don't stop at a pipeline able to debottleneck production from the Canadian oil sands and coal burning under utility boilers. They want to move humanity away from dependence on fossil energy, whatever the cost. The surge of North American supply from unconventional resources, such as oil sands and shales, threatens their program. So they demonize substances and activities related to it, such as carbon and hydraulic fracturing. In his Georgetown speech, Obama used the ludicrous phrase "carbon pollution" 30 times.
This lunacy resists an opportunity for North America to claim more control over its energy affairs than it has possessed for four decades. It threatens the business advantages that come from availability of relatively low-cost energy. And it asks the US, Canada, and maybe Mexico to trade prosperity for the sake of having acted on climate change without moderating warming at all. That's way too much to pay for a gesture.
