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The Washington Times Online Edition

Inside the Beltway

Winds of change

It’s reinventing-the-wheel time. The Obama administration has announced intentions to create a big, fat, shiny, new federal office called the “Climate Service” to track global warming, complete with six regional offices and lots of good intentions.

“It looks like the [warming] empire strikes back. Obama is attempting to engineer a global warming bailout. This is a classic response of the federal government: Bail out a corrupt and dying industry,” Marc Morano, editor of the watchdog site ClimateDepot.com, tells Inside the Beltway.

“What else would you expect of the feds? Man-made global warming has proven itself to be nothing more than sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics,” Mr. Morano adds. “This new federal agency will … produce the best science that politics can manufacture.”

But wait a minute. Don’t we already have an agency that does all this stuff? Could be:

“The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606), which called for ‘a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.’

“Thirteen departments and agencies participate in the USGCRP, which was known as the U.S. Climate Change Science Program from 2002 through 2008. The program is steered by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research under the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, overseen by the Executive Office of the President, and facilitated by an Integration and Coordination Office.”

Sounds familiar. Judge for yourself. This cumbersome passage comes right from the eye of the storm at www.globalchange.gov.

Cultural moment

Somebody buy something nice for Al Gore, perhaps:

“Snowpocalypse Now”

“Snowmageddon, snOMG”

“I survived Snowmageddon 2010”

(New t-shirts mottos from Zazzle.com.)

Do the math

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About the Author
Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

A graduate of Syracuse University, Jennifer Harper writes the daily Inside the Beltway column and provides additional coverage of breaking national news, plus long-term trends in politics, media issues, public opinion, popular culture, Hollywood foibles and “eureka” moments in health and science.

She has been a frequent broadcast commentator on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Voice of America, Citadel Broadcasting, ...

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