Lieberman’s Legacy: Good Man, Terrible Climate Policy
Recently Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced he will retire after his current term is up in 2012. This is nothing but good news for climate realists and the national energy policy future.
Don’t get me wrong. Joe is a “good guy,” and certainly the mainstream media thinks so. After his announcement, there was nothing but bowing and accolades for Joe’s time in office. All of the media in his home state, and across the country, proclaimed his accomplishments. Yes, in many affairs of state, Joe has made wise decisions — especially in matters of national security. Yet when it comes to matters of the environment, Lieberman was — and still is — blinded by the warmists and the environmental movement. In this realm, he has made some terrible decisions.
It is easy to see how this could happen.
The environmental movement sends messages urging us to save the planet from ecological disaster. The message is everywhere, all the “go green” images that permeate everyday living. The myth of drowning polar bears is a favorite of theirs, hand-in-hand with the message that humans are fundamentally to blame for everything that negatively impacts nature. It doesn’t matter how obscure or insignificant the impact, or that no proof exists that the damage was caused by human activity in the first place. Like so many others, Lieberman completely bought this sales pitch. In this area, he led us down the wrong path.
Lieberman, along with many other scientifically illiterate leaders, was swept up in the global warming hysteria that has inundated popular culture for more than a decade. Call it collective guilt for our amazing success, or a psychological need to appear morally superior to the masses, the message of the movement is that you must be a terrible person if you don’t want to “save the planet.” Who could be so selfish? Who could have the nerve to think independently about such a matter?
Lieberman couldn’t. In keeping with the laudable intention to save nature from you and me, Senator Lieberman and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) came within shouting distance in 2003 of passing a bill that likely would have had very serious detrimental effects on the lives of all Americans. It was called the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act of 2003. It was close to passage, defeated by a vote of 55 to 43.
The bill would have required mandatory, economy-wide emissions reductions, the most significant involving the production of carbon dioxide. The implementation of the bill would have taken place on January 1, 2010. During the first six years under the bill (2010-2016), annual greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced to year 2000 levels. After that, the amount released would be reduced to year 1990 levels. At its proposed scale, this would affect 70% of all United States greenhouse gas emissions — a huge percentage of our industrial base. How our economy was supposed to make up for this decrease in fossil fuels — which powers 87% of our economy — was apparently of little concern to the bill’s authors. That annoying little detail, reality, was ignored.
A cap-and-trade system was a critical component of the bill’s enforcement capability. The truly frightening part of the bill was how thoroughly it allowed government to command the economy, rather than allow the natural, successful, liberty-based system of supply and demand to run the show. It was another example of a mentality — the government knows best, their chosen experts must run the economy. (I thought we learned our lesson 20 years ago, when a big wall came down in Berlin.)
And, uh, there’s all those socialist bills he voted for including Obamacare, bailouts, stimulus, etc. The only thing he stayed “conservative” was Israel which should be no surprise.
“How our economy was supposed to make up for this decrease in fossil fuels — which powers 87% of our economy — was apparently of little concern to the bill’s authors. That annoying little detail, reality, was ignored.”
This is main reason why people like Obama and Pelosi, champions of this “cap and tax” nonsense, are so very dangerous. They are determined to force everyone to “go green” and reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, yet they never say what’s going to take its place. And if I hear one more person talk about wind and solar power, I’m going to scream! Four about 30 YEARS now various scientists and researchers have tried to make wind and solar power be more cost effective, AND THEY HAVE ALWAYS FAILED. It may work for a small town of about 5,000 people, but it will never work on a huge scale servicing the energy needs for cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Deal with it, you wind and sun worshippers. It just ain’t happening. So if we tax people to death by instituting cap and tax, people are either going to go broke or they’re going to have a hard time driving to work and staying warm in the winter and cool in the summer. These enviro-Nazis never think their plans through and they never seem to think about (or care about) how we are realistically going to meet our energy needs.
“It may work for a small town of about 5,000 people, but it will never work on a huge scale servicing the energy needs for cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.”
My suggestion is to force these cities as a priority to go “green”. WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT in these bastions of liberal stupidity…the bill will be repealed in a new york second. Let the experiment begin and see if they prefer darkness and the cold to their former living arrangements! Or unemployment that results from these idiotic, social experiments.
Excellent idea but of course it will never happen. The Left insists on imposing their ideas on others. They are our masters and, besides, they are better than us.
Lieberman is a good man?? If good to you means bringing America to it’s knees, then this slimeball, statist, politician is indeed a ‘good’ man.
Lieberman is not a “slimeball” by any decent standard. He’s just wrong.
Wrong, but wrong on principle. He’s not for sale, he’s not pandering to anyone. He’s following his (completely wrong) principles. He doesn’t shift with the political winds. He doesn’t say one thing when he means another. He’s that increasingly rare bird – a principled Democrat.
He may be the last of the breed.
Don’t say, “Good riddance!” too soon. His replacement will likely be far, far worse for America.
Art,
Albeit Lieberman seems to be ‘likable’, ANYONE in politics who has roots in the swamp long enough to ‘earn’ the ‘retire’ pat on the back is public enemy #1.
Honestly, this aristocratic-like idiocy is WHY hundreds of thousands of lives lost, USA created 330 + years ago.
Lieberman and others like him, though I do respect some established pols, they too should hang it up. The longer they’re in their positions the murkier their original reasoning for ‘representing the people’ becomes.
Lieberman is but another a-hole not respecting science, the scientific method, checks and balances, bowing to moronic Mother Gaia green types, having NO disregard to the U.S. economy (with that the millions of citizen’s jobs, who are providing for their families and further U.S. presence globally) as a whole.
Good riddance, Joe. Don’t let the door hit ‘ya where the good Lord split ‘ya.
One can be a “mentsch” and still be foolishly wrong. We are fortunate that this piece of enviro-nonsense never passed. But another Lieberman project *did* pass, and we’re paying for it daily. I’m referring to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, today one of the largest, most dysfunctional agencies we have.
Even if it’s turned out worse than I expected, I’m not surprised at the general result. As a long-time federal employee (now retired), I’d been through a number of reorganizations, none of which produced the forecast benefits. So the very idea of taking some 20-odd federal departments and agencies, each with their own culture, mandate, and internal workings and jamming them together because some part of their work dealt with security, was a recipe for disaster. And that’s what we’ve got.
By all accounts, Joe Lieberman is a nice guy, very religious and has high standards. He endorses the only technically sound position which bridges the enviro camp from the realist camp, conservation. Americans waste a lot of energy, and food. We are fat, lazy and undisciplined. That is not good. We should build better structures, buy vehicles that have nothing to do with ego, eat less, sweat more, shut off the TV, and read more serious books. If that happened, we would send a different breed to Washington D.C.
The ones we have now have a god complex; they actually believe they can alter the laws of God, by majority vote. By the laws of God, engineering and economics, there is no life sustaining substitute for combustion. If mankind does not use coal, oil, and natural gas (and uranium), billions are going to die. The billions without energy are dying right now. At some point (past due in my opinion) all politicians will stop sugar coating this fact of life.
Joe came into office with a big smile and will go out the same way. But he did very little good for his society.
We all *should* be good people, not waste things and take care of the environment. But those things cannot be legislated by congress. Join the Boy Scouts!
Joe Lieberman in my opinion was a very good man until he ran for VP with Al Gore. At that point he shifted his values for a VP chance.The Democrats rewarded him well did they not?
Lieberman a “good man”? Al Gore’s VP running mate? A Socialist ideologue clearly without appreciation for American principles, a shred of honor or integrity, or an ounce of discrimination? Lieberman is a fool who fell for the Global Warming fraud like a ton of bricks! What is such a doofus good for? Get him out of here!
Good riddance to anyone who supports the global warming scam. And that includes McCain. These idiots have no concept of what it means to give such penalizing, taxing and legislative powers to governments, the green organizations and socialists such as the UN, in order to “control” AGW. Making energy more expensive is their way of controlling the populace. It would create more poor people throughout the world, thereby making them more dependent on government for survival. I suspected global warming was a scam when to this day not a single “scientist” out of the thousands of “consensus of scientists” ever reviewed Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, for which he got an academy award. So much for the search for the truth in Hollywood. The inconvenient truth for global warming proponents can be found at the following link.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html
The one thing more difficult than practicing a way of life is not imposing it on others. Yet Lieberman does not even spend his own time in charitable work, but he is happy to use the omnipotent state to threaten confiscation and prison for those who do not contribute to his opinions of it. This is called compassion and good conscience.
So long as we need to control other people, however benign we believe our motives, we are captive to that need.
Lieberman acquired his good guy reputation by posing as a conservative and (presumably) reluctantly voting as a liberal. He was a fraud and a con man. To give him any honors would be equivalent to erecting a statue of Bernie Maddoff on Wall Street.
When one does not see what one does not see one does not even see than one is blind.
Lieberman personifies that anonymous quote. How much longer can the charade last (before the vast majority of the voting public figure it all out)?
In 2007, Al Gore was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work documenting the dangers of global warming.
Also nominated that year was Irena Sendler.
Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize over Irena Sendler.
It is a sick world, indeed.
I will say again that John McCain should be dumped at the ballot box. He now thinks Obummer is a changed man.ha ha ha ha
Joe Lieberman is a fascist, plain and simple.
Give me a break! Liebermann was just another climate demagogue who voted to impoverish his fellow americans on the basis of a lie in order to advance his political career.Another bag of excrement leaves the political arena. Good Riddance!