Obama as Climate Strongman: Taking the Chavez Adoration a Step Too Far

So it seems that both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill House bill and Senate EPW Committee-passed version of Kerry-Boxer both have buried in them what the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott describes, in revealing the measure, a “nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.” Requires might seem strong, in that you would assume a moderate president or simply one not engaged in an effort to “fundamentally transform America” would feel no obligation to seize a loophole installed for such an activist leader.

But you would be wrong, on both counts. The provision is quite clearly installed for green pressure groups to sue to force the chief executives’ hands to seize all manner of power otherwise unavailable to him under our system but desired by the greens and whatever they can convince the federal court’s 9th Circuit is in our interests. That is, the bill actually does mandate that a “climate emergency” be declared by the federal government when global greenhouse gas concentrations – which are not something which the bill or the United States can control and over which we have a decreasing influence each day – reach 450 parts per million. Which the bill’s authors knew would already be the case by the time the bill was adopted.

At that point President Obama, using powers he worked to craft and signed into law, would “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions…to address shortfalls” in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions. Again, it isn’t in the U.S.’s power to bring global concentrations to any particular level, and even if we disappeared off the face of the earth no global warming computer model relied upon by the alarmist industry even says that it would detectably impact the climate.

But as we have been warning you in detail, this agenda transparently is not about GHG concentrations, or the climate.

It’s about what this provision would bring: almost limitless power over private economic activity and individual liberty for the activist president and, for the reluctant leader, litigious greens and courts that in this case would only have two choices. Those are follow the law, or declare it unconstitutional knowing the predilections of the appellate courts and what will very soon be Obama’s Supreme Court.

Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, a Republican, asked Obama’s EPA Administrator what measures this contemplates, and she refused to provide any examples. That could lead to debate, yielding public awareness. However, as Tapscott reasonably asked, “Would the president be empowered to do things like nationalize whole sectors of industry, ban coal use, restrict private automobile use, or whatever else the ‘emergency’ requires?”

Well, that’s the point. And after Obama is gone, just what this means won’t be up to the president any more, but the greens, their lawyers, and activist courts.

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Tags: Barack Obama, carbon emissions, climate change, coal plants, global warming, greenhouse gases, Kerry-Boxer, Waxman-Markey
Posted Nov 10th 2009 at 1:31 pm in Congress, Environment, News, Obama, Politics | 2823817 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/11/10/obama-as-climate-strongman-taking-the-chavez-adoration-a-step-too-far/Obama+as+Climate+Strongman%3A+Taking+the+Chavez+Adoration+a+Step+Too+Far2009-11-10+20%3A31%3A35Christopher+C.+Horner