Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, threw cold water Wednesday on President Obama’s Alaska climate-change tour, saying the president’s proposed regulatory fixes have put him on “thin ice.”
“The president is on thin ice to claim his costly plan will address climate change or benefit Americans,” said the Texas Republican in a statement.
Mr. Obama, who visited Alaska this week for an international climate-change conference, painted climate-driven doomsday scenarios in his remarks, warning that “if we do nothing to keep the glaciers from melting faster, and oceans from rising faster, and forests from burning faster, and storms from growing stronger, we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.”
Climate-change skeptics have moved to debunk the president’s predictions. In his statement, Mr. Smith said that “the only thing certain about long-term climate predictions is that they’re certain to miss the mark.”
“The president and his EPA have become traveling salesmen, touring the world to push their extreme climate change agenda,” Mr. Smith said. “But the science doesn’t support the president’s exaggerated claims linking climate change to severe weather events.”
He noted that catastrophic hurricanes are on the decline, despite warnings by climate-change alarmists that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are driving “extreme weather events.”
Mr. Smith also argued that the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent spate of proposed regulations aimed at combating climate change will do little to lower the temperature while dealing a body blow to the economy.
“EPA’s own data show that its Power Plan regulation would eliminate less than one percent of global carbon emissions and would reduce sea level rise by only 1/100th of an inch, the thickness of three sheets of paper,” Mr. Smith said. “But it will do lasting damage to our economy, stifle economic growth, destroy jobs and increase energy prices for all Americans.”
At the three-day GLACIER conference in Anchorage, Mr. Obama told delegates that the “time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past.”
