"Climate of Fear"

Jeff Jacoby nails it.

Excerpts:

"Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can't be true. Or to wonder whether any of them are.
Perhaps that is why most Americans discount the climate-change fear-mongering that is so fashionable among journalists and politicians.

Last spring, as Time magazine was hyperventilating about global warming ('The debate is over. Global warming is upon us -- with a vengeance. From floods to fires, droughts to storms, the climate is crashing'), a Gallup poll was finding that only 36 percent of the public say they worry 'a great deal' about it."

"'The whole aim of practical politics,' wrote H.L. Mencken, 'is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Mencken was writing in 1920, but some things never change.'"


Meanwhile, Bob Novack alerts us to the potentially ruinous legislation being proposed in the new Democrat-controlled Congress.

Noteworthy:

"The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates this measure would reduce gross domestic product by $776 billion, raise gasoline prices 40 cents a gallon, raise natural gas prices 46 percent and cut coal production by nearly 60 percent."

"Ultimate salvation from U.S. self-destructive behavior may come from the real world. Most European Union countries, suffering higher energy costs and constraints on growth imposed by the Kyoto pact, cannot meet that treaty's emission level requirements. Furthermore, China is on pace to exceed U.S. emissions by 2010, meaning that unilateral U.S. carbon controls will have little impact on global emissions while driving American jobs to China."


We need to STOP this proposed insanity in its tracks.