January 16th 2009
The Dirty Launch Of Obama’s Presidency
O
bama’s reputedly smooth transition has been marred lately by many things, including some criticisms of the coronation inauguration’s $100 million-plus price tag (more than double that of the last Bush inaugural, which the Left thought impeachably overpriced) and the inauguration contributions from the heart-of-darkness Left (like George Soros’ $50,000 contribution). Here’s one more, which the mainly marginalized media also will try desperately to ignore:
The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.
That’s David Harsanyi writing at Real Clear Politics. The inauguration (a.k.a. OMCB, Obama’s Massive Carbon Belch) will offset years of benefits of recent or proposed Congressional actions to lighten the carbon load and save the planet. Banning incandescent lightbulbs? That’ll offset about 8.3 minutes of the OMCB as I figure it.
The Institute’s news release details how the OMCB will pile on the pounds of CO2:
- The 600 private jets expected to fly visitors to and from the event will produce 25,320,000 POUNDS of CO2
- Personal vehicles could account for 262,483,200 POUNDS of CO2
- In the Inaugural parade, horses alone will produce more than 400 POUNDS of CO2
The sheer magnitude of the hypocrisy on display may seem funny (not that there’s anything new here), but Harsanyi isn’t laughing:
And on the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backside off, the new Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman claimed, as The Associated Press put it, “Inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession.”
Waxman’s methane emission merely would reek if it weren’t so catastrophically sad. I learned long ago that any dissent on climate alarmism will be met with unflinching fury, but is there anyone who can argue genuinely that inaction on “climate issues” (formerly known as global warming) has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn?
Our plight, in actuality, likely will be exacerbated if Waxman gets his way. Playing on the public’s fear of climate change, we almost certainly are about to see a nationalized energy policy and price controls through cap and trade.
The late economist and journalist Henry Hazlitt once wrote that those who attempt “to lift the prices of particular commodities permanently above their natural market levels have failed so often, so disastrously and so notoriously” that no one admits to wanting to try it.
No one, that is, except all the Dems in Congress, who seem perfectly content to ignore the history lessons of economics at every turn.
Obama has signaled that he may indeed op for sanity on many key issues despite his campaign rhetoric (see Charles Krauthammer’s Bush’s Imminent Rehab), but I haven’t heard any backing off from the campaign’s shrieking Warmie hysteria. Indeed, even if he did see reason, could Obama stop Wackman and his slinking ilk from feverishly pursuing legislation that would trash the economy in the name of defending us from an iffy theory?
To recast Hazlitt, those who attempt to lift the common sense and economic underestanding of Dems permanently above their natural levels have failed so often, so disastrously and so notoriously that no one admits to wanting to try it. Including me.
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