Planet Gore

(NRO) – Possibly scrambling to get right with the Bitter Clingers in Scranton after Hurricane Sarah reminding them that he speaks differently to their face than when they’re not around, Obama dangerously went off-prompter again today to talk about global warming. Fear and channeling the End of Days is one way to change the subject.

In addition to ditching the prompter he went into slightly more detail than he chose to give when a lot more people were watching at the Ocrapolis. I heard the tape on Rush, and recall some of it verbatim (possibly all, but if not consider it a very close paraphrase). His key points of evidence, in support of his claim that “global warming is a serious problem, you know, it’s not just some tree-hugger, uh, sprout-eating liberal thing,” are that “the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are warming.”

Planet Gore

Caps, not cap, and melting. Sure, global warming computer models tell us that a greenhouse warming signal is polar amplification, both poles. And our lyin’ eyes tell us the Antarctic is steadily gaining ice mass, and the other end of the planet has a mere 700,000 square miles more ice today than a year ago today. And even NPR has openly struggled over what to call global-warming-without-the-warming after learning that while computer models were still telling us the oceans should be warming, the actual observations were telling us that they were not. Possibly this was Obama’s avatar speaking?

Anyway, I hope he’s got something else in his rhetorical bag to explain how he’s not a sprout-eating — or arugula-eating — liberal.

By the way, when I was looking for a transcript or tape, the first hit was from the Scranton Times-Tribune home page showing The One waiting in an SUV, beneath his airplane (if it’s changed, see here). I wonder if he really thinks he can keep doing that and just think other countries will say that’s ok.

My friends over at the National Center for Public Policy Research have put together a generally superb summary of the shortcomings of the Pickens Plan. The report says that the plan raises several questions:

Has oil production finally and irrevocably peaked, as Pickens claims?  Why use wind power instead of nuclear power?  Are natural gas-powered vehicles a viable alternative to gasoline-powered cars, and would switching to them improve America’s security?  What does Pickens believe the federal government should do to make his plan a reality?  Might he or the firms he owns benefit financially from such federal aid?

Free-market conservatives may not be impressed with the answers Pickens seems to favor.

YOU CAN’T FUEL ALL OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are “anti-choice.”

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats’ “energy” policies.

Democrats couldn’t care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in “The Population Explosion” that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That’s not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama’s response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies. “Corporate taxes” sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, “We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.”

What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, “You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!” “You can’t water your way out of drought!” “You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!” “You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!”

Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. It’s the only solution they can think of to deal with the beastly traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway).

How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.

Liberals complain that — as B. Hussein Obama put it — there’s “no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.”

This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now.

Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then?

Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises.

If only we had had such a group — let’s call them “elected representatives” — they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them — we’ll call them Republicans — did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions.

Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill!

We’d be gushing oil now — except the Democrats stopped us from drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party — plus John McCain — ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. Instead of Drill! Drill! Drill!, their motto could be: Kill! Kill! Kill!

They refuse to believe our abortion studies? I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices.