OPINION:
Former President Donald Trump once again leads the polls in six of the seven key battleground states, according to a Bloomberg News survey released Wednesday. For President Biden, that means it’s time to declare an emergency — a climate emergency.
Doing so would excite his leftist base while energizing billionaire donors heavily invested in windmills and solar panels, the sources of green energy whose continued existence depends on generous federal subsidies.
The public will never willingly trade the advantages of cheap and efficient fossil fuels for power sources that disappear when the sky is cloudy and winds are calm. Thus, an emergency declaration could unlock the powers required to implement an unpopular energy policy without the inconvenience of seeking congressional approval.
Bloomberg cites “people familiar with the matter” to claim that West Wing officials are seriously considering invoking the National Emergencies Act and related authorities to block crude oil exports, shut down offshore oil rigs, force consumers to “save” electricity and compel arbitrary limits on the tools that make modern life livable, like air conditioning or perhaps even gas stoves.
Mr. Biden has already imposed a “temporary” ban on liquefied natural gas exports at the beginning of the year, saying the move was necessary because climate change is “the existential threat of our time.”
A recent study by researchers at the Military University of Technology in Poland pokes a hole in the main assumption underlying the assertion that man-made carbon dioxide threatens to overcook the planet.
The scientists set up an experiment demonstrating carbon dioxide’s ability to warm the atmosphere has a limit. Once carbon dioxide levels reach this saturation point, warming cannot increase. As the atmosphere already has reached this point, at about 400 parts per million, there’s no need to worry about further carbon-dioxide emissions causing temperature changes.
The paper concludes: “The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO2 and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence.”
These scientific findings run contrary to the alarmism from the likes of U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, who earlier this month declared time is running out. “When I say we have two years to save the world, it begs the question — who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet,” Mr. Stiell said.
Apocalyptic predictions along these lines are used as a battering ram to bypass representative government to impose radical and unpopular schemes. The Green New Deal, for instance, gained prominence as then-teenage Swedish climate expert Greta Thunberg issued her dramatic prediction in 2018 that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”
The world is still here, and Ms. Thunberg’s prognostic tweets have since been deleted, yet aspects of the Green New Deal are nonetheless being implemented by Mr. Biden through a series of executive orders and line items in massive omnibus spending bills.
Enough is enough. The only real emergency is Mr. Biden’s inability to convince voters he deserves to be reelected.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.