Let’s Not Drill Where We’ll Get All That Messy Oil
Sometimes a picture is worth a zillion words. Via Powerline.
Entries Tagged as 'Liberal Hypocrisy'
It’s Beyond Slippery
Powerline has an excellent dissection of Obama’s New York Times op-ed about Iraq.
Obama admits that he opposed the surge, and the attendant change in strategy and tactics, that have brought us close to victory. But he somehow manages to twist his being wrong about the surge–the major foreign policy issue that has arisen during his time in Congress–into vindication:
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
Actually, however, Obama opposed the surge not because of those “factors” but because he thought it would fail. He said, on January 10, 2007, on MSNBC:
I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.
55 - A Magical Number
Lame-duck Senator John Warner (R?!?-VA) has asked the Energy Department to investigate the potential costs and benefits of a federally-mandated 55 mph speed limit everywhere.
One of the problems with having a geriatric legislature of life-tenured incumbents is that its members spend a lot of time thinking about the good old days. From 1974-1995, an identical law was in force. This was a bad idea of Richard Nixon (who also imposed wage/price controls in a futile effort to limit inflation) designed to get the U.S. through an oil crisis.
This law was universally broken, beginning with mild violations along the Eastern seaboard and increasing as one traveled westward with the highest speeds generally present in Western states like Nevada (which “enforced” the national speed limit with a $5.00 waste-of-resources fine for a period of time).
The practical question for drivers was not whether they would drive 55 or not (everyone drove faster), but rather how much faster could they drive without receiving a ticket. 5 mph over was a safe bet everywhere. West of the Mississippi, 10 mph over almost never caused problems and 15 mph over was frequently observed.
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Global Warming as a Cult
Interesting letter in today’s Wall Street Journal - print and online - about the ways in which global warming is like a religious cult. This responds to Brett Stephens’ opinion piece entitled Global Warming as Mass Neurosis that I blogged about here. It doesn’t look like I can do a permalink to the letter, so I’ll reproduce it in full.
Here are the global warming movement’s cultic parallels, many of whose characteristics can be found in Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharias’s famous 2003 book, “The Kingdom of the Cults”:
(1) Leadership by a New Age prophet — in this case, former Vice President Al Gore.
(2) Assertion of an apocalyptic threat to all mankind.
(3) An absolutist definition of both the threat and the proposed solution(s).
(4) Promise of a salvation from this pending apocalypse.
(5) Devotion to an inspired text which embodies all the answers — in this case Mr. Gore’s pseudo-scientific book “Earth in the Balance” and his new “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary.
(6) A specific list of “truths” which must be embraced and proselytized by all cult members.
(7) An absolute intolerance of any deviation from any of these truths by any cult member.
Why should the East and West coasts get a complete pass on drilling?
From the Houston Chronicle:
I haven’t got anything against the residents of Florida and California. They seem like friendly folks.
But as a resident of the Central Gulf Coast, I have to ask: Where do they get off, insisting that their beaches should be protected from the evils of oil and gas drilling and production?
2500 scientists can’t be wrong
Lawrence Solomon made a presentation at the Petroleum Club in Calgary and discussed the scientific consensus that global warming proponents are always talking about.
Let me tell you why most people think that global warming is a serious problem. It comes down to one number: 2500. That’s the number of scientists associated with the UN’s Panel on Climate Change that the press reports has endorsed the UN Panel’s conclusions. These are the conclusions that get released in the UN’s mammoth reports every six years or so, and that then dominate the media airwaves for weeks.
“2500 scientists can’t be wrong,” the press always says, explicitly or implicitly. Without that number, it would have no basis for the claim that they repeat over and over again — that there’s a consensus on climate change.
2500 is an impressive number of scientists. To find out who, exactly, they were, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. The Secretariat replied that the names were not public, so I couldn’t have them. And I learned that the 2500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers.
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