By Steve Milloy
June 3, 2011, Washington Times
What would Al Gore do? Could that really be New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s thought process? The GOP’s darling and “please-run-for-president-now” governor earned national attention last week for pulling New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the cap-and-trade program set up by Northeast states.
But in doing so, Mr. Christie revealed a serious lapse in political instinct and judgment that should cause Republicans to ask whether he and others like him are ready for the White House.
In his announcement, Mr. Christie also stated, “I’m certainly not a scientist, which is the first problem. So I can’t claim to fully understand all of this, certainly not after just a few months of study. But when you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts.”
Here’s the problem: While it’s no unpardonable sin to be underinformed about the global warming controversy – although it does make one wonder where Mr. Christie has been all these years as even the average grade-schooler has been well-immersed in the controversy – Mr. Christie’s instinct was to buy into Mr. Gore’s bogus mantra that a consensus of scientists says humans are giving the planet a fever via carbon-dioxide emissions.
Mr. Gore’s view, of course, is also held by President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Sen. Barbara Boxer – are you getting the idea? – every nitwit Hollywood celebrity, the Discovery Channel gunman, Charles Manson and even the now-deceased Osama bin Laden.
Not only is there no such consensus, science doesn’t work by consensus. Even if did, more than 31,000 U.S. scientists on record oppose climate alarmism (see PetitionProject.org).
Maybe it’s just me, but I do have an issue with a GOP presidential wannabe essentially embracing this calculus – “I don’t know enough about climate change, so I’ll side with the ever-forked-tongue Al Gore.”
The larger issue here is how many other GOP presidential candidates might have the same calculus. We know former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. once believed in climate alarmism. We know newfound skeptic Newt Gingrich appeared with Mrs. Pelosi in a Gore-sponsored TV ad.
Mitt Romney has expressed reservations about taking unilateral action on greenhouse gases, but his broader view on climate science is, at best, unknown. Tim Pawlenty has renounced his support for cap-and-trade. But has he embraced climate skepticism?
This is important because, if we are so lucky as to have a Republican elected president in 2012, he will need to hit the ground running in terms of getting a grip on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) scheme for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions.
It will take a great deal of intellectual and intestinal fortitude for the next president to go through the many-months-long and politically painful process of forcing the EPA to delist greenhouse gases as a threat to public welfare under the Clean Air Act.
If the next president is not onboard with the real (versus the Al Gore-type) science of climate change, then it’s not likely he will be able to force through the sorts of changes at the EPA that reality warrants and that America desperately needs.
America is blessed with abundant natural resources in terms of coal, natural gas and oil. If our economy is ever to recover and support growth, we will need to tap those resources at unprecedented levels. Domestic manufacturing will also need to be unleashed and not hindered with EPA regulations that accom- plish nothing other than the prevention of business.
All this will require overcoming an EPA bureaucracy that has deep ties and sympathies with extreme and anti-business environmental activist groups.
A president who is unsure about whether he’s doing the right thing is a president who won’t be able to provide the necessary leadership to actually do the right thing.
To rein in the EPA, the next president needs to model Ronald Reagan’s attitude toward our former mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. No, the EPA can’t wipe us out with missiles, but it sure can choke our economy to death – like Mr. Obama’s EPA is doing now with its train wreck of new and pending regulations.
Is global warming science a litmus test? In 2012 America, yes.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).
I think Christie may have been dancing around the issue a bit. He didn’t say outright that he believed in global warming nor did he say he didn’t which he may think keeps him safe from the criticisms of both sides. When he said it’s time to defer to the experts, maybe he didn’t necessarily mean the 90% of the world’s scientists who believe it are actually the experts he was referring to. It could be what he didn’t say and not what he did that matters.
Study historical data, You’ll find climate change back before
the use of fossil fuels. Get real, Gore has found a way to get
richer blaming everything and everybody. Keep this in mind
“Figures don’t lie but liers figure” do your own homework and
and check factual data.
Joe
I assume Christie is referring to 90% of the AGW alarmist scientists that are grant dependent. He could not be talking about the tens of thousands of international scientists that debunk this nonsense.
Christy is a rhino. The so-called “conservatives” who want him to ru for president are probably the same idiots who voted for Obama and now have buyer’s remorse. These people are too dumb, stupid and lazy to do any real research to fond out who a candidate really is. All the information was available on Obama, his voting record, his close associates (terrorists and racists), his activist work, etc. These people define the term “useful idiots”.
Keep up the good work Steve.
We need to vet every Republican candidate for president on his energy credentials. It is better for Obama to be re-elected than to have a Republican who agrees or sympathizes with the thesis burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide that causes catastrophic global warming. If we elected someone like this, how can you keep the Republican members in Congress following a policy to thwart this proposition?
Energy is the winning issue in this election. Obama is commited to an energy policy that will reduce the United States to an insignificant economic power by eliminating our advantage of vast fossil fuel resources. After realizing Congress would not pass cap-and-trade in the Fall of 2009, President Obama said “there are other ways to skin a cat”. The cat has lost its fur. President Obama is using the EPA to eliminate fossil fuel use by regulation. He may get away with this through apathy of the public, media, and Congress.
It is not obvious to me at this time any Republican candidate for president is knowledgable or smart enough to see the winning campaign issue for this election.
James H. Rust