Activists like Richard Branson pride themselves on
perpetual adolescence, seeing no contradiction between the
jet-setting hedonism they practice and the abstemious
environmentalism they preach. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s
comparison of the American people to adolescents should offend
these celebrity activists a bit.
“The American people…just like your teenage kids, aren’t
acting in a way that they should act,” the Wall Street
Journal quoted Chu as saying earlier this week,
which added that environmental officials in the Obama
administration have “launched a cross-country tour of 6,000
schools to teach students about climate change and energy
efficiency.”
Chu quickly denied that he compared Americans to heedless
teenagers, though he does hope the American public will submit to
the Obama administration’s tutoring and see escalating energy
costs as a great boon to the economy. According to his spokesman,
Chu sees the “need to educate the broader public about how
important clean energy industries are to our competitive position
in the global economy.” Now that Van Jones isn’t around to talk
about “green collar” jobs, Chu’s task in convincing Americans to
rejoice at losing their blue-collar ones is all that much
harder.
If the American people are skeptical that thousands of
dollars added to their energy bills in coming years and lost jobs
from pulverized industries will improve their competitive
position in life, they are not alone. China and Japan, among
other nations keen on retaining their competitive position in the
global economy, have no intention of signing an international
climate pact at the upcoming summit in Copenhagen. These
countries would prefer to pursue “independent climate
goals,”
says the Washington Post.
And whether or not those will be kept is an open question,
as Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, hedged: “Japan’s
efforts alone cannot halt climate change, even if it sets an
ambitious reduction target.”
So does this mean the “irreversible catastrophe” of which
Obama spoke in his climate change talk at the UN will now happen?
One would think so if global warming theory were true. But the
peddlers of it never cancel their future plans after
international climate pacts stall or dissolve.
Obama is confident that this “irreversible catastrophe” can
be addressed in a “flexible and pragmatic” manner, which sounds
about as plausible as his promise to expand health care coverage
while cutting costs.
Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, in his speech to the UN
reported by the Post, lamented one more
year of empty talk.
“On cue, we stand here and tell you just how bad things
are. We warn you that unless you act quickly and decisively, our
homelands and others like it will disappear beneath the rising
sea before the end of the century,” he said. “But then, once the
rhetoric has settled and the delegates have drifted away, the
sympathy fades, and the indignation cools, and the world carries
on as before.”
Chu, for his part, doesn’t sound all that worried. The
Copenhagen accord isn’t all that crucial after all. Focus,
instead, on America’s clean-energy plans, he
told reporters.
But isn’t “collective” action more important than ever in a
world where America shouldn’t be dominating? The torrent of
blah-blah-blah speeches from Obama this week making that claim
didn’t stop him from acting like the Caesar of the world. He
peppered his speeches with implied criticisms of the previous
administration that alternated between casting it as a thug and a
“bystander.”
Meanwhile, we’re learning that clean-energy initiatives
carry risks of their own beyond sapping the economy, as suggested
by this front-page headline in the Post on
Wednesday: “The Deadly Silence of the Electric Car.” The American
Federation of the Blind and others fear that noiseless electric
cars will clip the unsuspecting — one more tricky new problem
for Chu and company to solve as they engineer a “cultural shift”
in America.
