Kerry and Graham on Global Warming: So Awfully Different

by Christopher C. Horner

Sens. John Kerry and Lindsey Graham had a piece Sunday in the New York Times, stumbling through a pro-cap-and-trade routine. Initial thoughts on this homage to the bipartisanship fetish:

The “we even have different accents” bit tips their hand that the argument is as substantive as those Gore-group ads with Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson on a couch together. Not a bad parallel actually, though I can’t help but recall this far more entertaining version of the labored intro.

When one feels compelled to give six reasons why we ought to embrace their idea, you know they aren’t persuaded themselves with the “global warming” argument, and see little persuasive opportunity in it.

The piece is on occasion incoherent. See the, er, paragraph, of seemingly unrelated statements with the general theme of economy and trade: We cannot sacrifice any more jobs to competitors (but no comment as to what making energy costs “necessarily skyrocket” would do to help that). India and China have decided to make windmills and solar panels (because rich countries have vowed to spend billions on them…how illuminating). We should penalize any countries that don’t do this too (defeating the implicit but wisely unstated argument that this will help our economy).

To end by quivering over the EPA threat to do this to our economy if we all don’t just succumb to legislation instead, which is a threat that Congress could avoid with a stroke of a pen about 1,300 pages shorter than the House bill, provides an apt epitaph to this inanity: the effort to provide the most aggressive and largest regulatory intervention in our history is, after all this time and money, still cannot muster a meaningful argument in favor.


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Posted Oct 15th 2009 at 12:45 pm in Congress, Environment, Politics, Uncategorized | 133 Comments