Protecting the country from non-existent threats while exposing
it to real ones is likely to define the incoming administration.
So it is appropriate that Hillary Clinton, in her opening remarks
before the Senate on Tuesday, identified as an “unambiguous
security threat” something that doesn’t even exist —
catastrophic global warming.
A hectoring phrase like “unambiguous security threat” is supposed
to dispel all doubts. Instead, it should create them,
foreshadowing an administration that will treat the nation’s
security and economy frivolously.
Fiddling around with the economy for the sake of nothing more
than advancing chic conjecture is the last thing an America in
recession needs. Yet the Obama administration has already
signaled that it will saddle slumping businesses with a global
warming tax and onerous regulations, whenever the chance to sign
a Kyoto-style treaty presents itself, perhaps in Copenhagen soon.
In all the talk these days about scams and bogus claims at the
expense of shareholders and taxpayers, why doesn’t the global
warming activism of opportunistic CEOs and pols receive any
scrutiny? It belongs to this age of fictions and dubious
collusions between government and business.
The Democrats bemoan the alarmism that led America to war, yet
practice it on global warming, with John Kerry recycling the Bush
administration’s risks-of-inaction cliché. By now we should know
that in American politics nothing is as risky as action.
According to Hillary’s testimony, climate change “threatens our
very existence,” before she put forward another modest assertion:
“But well before that point, it could well incite wars of an old
kind over basic resources — like food, water, and arable land.”
It looks like Hillary is borrowing a page from her old friend,
Timothy Wirth, the Clinton administration State Department
official who once let the cat out of the bag by touting the
ideological benefits of reckless alarmism: “What we’ve got to do
in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached
global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we
will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy
and environmental policy.”
In order to scam the nation into statism, liberals know that they
cannot afford to hedge their rhetoric or be too circumspect in
their assertions. Al Gore’s inconvenient half-baked opinion had
to be called “An Inconvenient Truth,” lest anyone doubt the
necessity of accepting a “truth.” Now Hillary and Kerry ratchet
global warming theory’s status up even more, to that of
“unambiguous security threat.”
At Davos a couple years back, Bill Clinton, yielding to no one in
his capacity for concern, declared that global warming “is the
only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the
march of civilization as we know it.”
If a threat to the future of civilization exists, it will come
not from the environment but from environmentalists. An
extortionist agenda that will bankrupt industries (as Obama
glibly warned the coal industry in an interview with the San
Francisco Chronicle during the campaign) and creeping world
government pose the gravest threats.
Hillary, Kerry, and Obama are acting like a committee of Greek
Gods who will control the weather for the world. “President-elect
Obama has said America must be a leader in developing and
implementing a global and coordinated response to climate
change,” Hillary said in her testimony.
Stocking his administration with global warming activists, Obama
senses that this issue could give full range to his ambitions. It
is certainly an issue which lends itself to the apocalyptic
rhetoric that surrounds him — that he, as the liberal columnist
Mark Morford once put it, could “actually help usher in a new way
of being on the planet.”
While Hillary Clinton may not want to feed those ambitions, she
does see global warming alarmism as a path to ideological ones.
Christine Stewart, the former Canadian Minister of the
Environment, would have understood Hillary’s game in calling
global warming an “unambiguous security threat.”
“No matter if the science is phony, there are collateral
environmental benefits,” Stewart has said. “Climate change
[provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and
equality in the world.”
