Reason’s Shikha Dalmia isn’t deceived by the absence of global warming rhetoric in President Obama’s past SOTU address:
President Barack Obama uttered not a peep about global warming in his State of Union this year. No dire warnings about climate apocalypse. No calls for cap-and-trade. Has this cold winter convinced him to put his global warming agenda on ice?
Hardly. Indeed, even in this age of deficits and debt, the president’s budget is chock full of global warming items-except he wraps them around a new cause: clean energy.
Dalmia assembles a long list of green energy programs, the President would like to fund using tax-payer money. Not necessarily by raising taxes (don’t hold your breath on that!) but by diverting subsidies currently going to oil producers, to renewable energy.
The danger with proposals for clean energy is that, unlike global warming rhetoric, clean energy proposal are on a path to securing bipartisan support. So, Dalmia is making the important point that clean energy is simply another name for global warming.
Global warming is a dying cause because the costs of the favored “fixes” for the problem vastly outweigh the supposed benefits-and China and India aren’t going to stop industrializing, and stay poor, simply to please Western elites. Republicans should wake up and not let Obama use the guise of clean energy to keep the anti-warming crusade alive.
I wrote on this topic, before, in “The Clean Energy Scheme,” where I argued that:
If clean energy standards take off to become the new bi-partisan energy policy proposal, it will be because Republicans and Democrats will have come to the conclusion that if everyone gets to subsidize their best energy friends, everyone wins! Except taxpayers, who will not only bear the burden of financing government spending in the form of energy subsidies, but who will also be faced with much higher energy costs.