Climate Change's Ugly Resurrection

It’s the end of the world! Or at least, that’s what liberals want you to think concerning global climate change.  This issue has been somewhat under the radar, but it’s going to be thrust back into the spotlight after Obama’s inaugural address – where he said that ” we will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”  Furthermore, his obsession with wasteful green energy initiatives hasn’t subsided:

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise.  That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared

Of course, MSNBC was all over this.  Liberal commentator Chris Hayes went on to say that we’re on the “frontier of climate disaster.”  Talk about scare tactics. Now that science has turned against them, liberals – and greenies – will have to resort to apocalyptic prognostications, even though global warming ended sixteen years ago.  How else could they pursue an agenda of more consolidated power within Washington.  In fact, some have compared global warming to the Nazi threat, and their development of atomic weapons during World War II.

In a January 17 op-ed in The Washington Post by Naomi Oreskes, she wrote that:

…President Obama can move independently of Congress to address this critical issue: He can mobilize scientists through the U.S. national laboratory system.

There is a powerful precedent for the president to take this route. The core of the national laboratory system was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the Manhattan Project to address an earlier threat to American safety and security: the possibility that German scientists were going to build an atomic bomb that could have been decisive in World War II. Scientists brought the issue to the president’s attention and then did what he asked: They built a deliverable weapon in time for use in the war.

While historians have long argued about the seriousness of the threat of a Nazi atomic bomb, there is no question that at the time it was viewed as imminent. Today we face a threat that is somewhat less immediate but far less speculative. An obvious response is to engage the national laboratory system to study options to reduce or alleviate climate change, which the president could do by executive order.