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.

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