Reality, Hypocrisy, Pointlessness and Failure...

The usual morning perusal of Investor Business Daily led to a perfect four-topic lead-in.

First of all, Reality:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83% below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Skeptics about the shrill certitudes concerning catastrophic man-made warming are skeptical because climate change is constant: From millennia before the Medieval Warm Period (800 to 1300), through the Little Ice Age (1500 to 1850), and for millennia hence, climate change is always a 100% certainty. Skeptics doubt that the scientists' models, which cannot explain the present, infallibly map the distant future.
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Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's — especially America's — population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments.

But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth's last chance, until the next one.

That is reality: there is no way that the US, let alone the industrialized countries of the world, will accept penitence and poverty - for that would be the results of 450 mn people living with the per capita emissions of 1875 - in exchange for ... what? A "scientific consensus" that is a secular religion, complete with preachers and a pope (his Holiness Al Gore)?

Now, this is also reality:

We'll let others comment on the hypocrisy of those who, while trying to force the rest of us into an ever-smaller carbon footprint, will employ more than 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets while producing 880 pounds of CO2 per attendee at their conference.

Or the even-worse hypocrisy of Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.'s global warming guru, who in one 19-month period flew 443,243 miles — including trips to have dinner at Washington's Brookings Institution and one memorable overnighter to attend a cricket match — but now wants the rest of us to be forced into a "carbon allowance."

That's right: the man chanting sonorously about the horrors that will face the world unless His Will Be Done flew to attend a cricket match. Of course, he won't have to pay the carbon allowance, he's doing The Good Work.

The hypocrisy here is about as bad as that of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, thoroughly corrupted and begging for a Martin Luther to nail his theses to the door of the Cathedral at Worms.

Now for something completely pointless:

The Environmental Protection Agency has declared carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for life on Earth, to be a health hazard that has to be managed. What follows will be a useless bureaucratic exercise.

The announcement was made by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — the same official who admitted under oath in July that no matter what the U.S. does about carbon emissions, it will have little impact on global CO2 levels if China and India don't limit their output.

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Carbon dioxide is simply a natural product of the respiration process that keeps animals alive and the combustion that powers and expands economies. Without it, we have none of the lush greenery or old-growth trees that environmentalists pretend to protect.

These environmentalists, who presumably have no problem with naturally occurring carbon emissions, argue that it's the man-made CO2 that's causing the planet to warm. But that's nonsense. CO2 makes up a mere 0.0384% of the atmosphere, and man's contribution to that is only about 3%.

I calculated that out: man-made CO2 is 0,001152% of the atmosphere. For this we should wear hair shirts and live in utter poverty to please our new ecological masters?

This from the left, pointing to their failure:

Getting a health care bill is important on its own, but it's central to establishing Obama's credentials as a domestic reformer and to proving that Democrats are capable of governing.

The Democrats are doing their level-headed best to prove that what they claim to be stereotypes - incapable of governing, given to wild-eyed conspiracy and lunatic fringe theories that have no basis in empirical reality, spendthrifts when it comes to other people's monies, dependent on massive public spending to get anything done, incapable of working with business and commerce, and beholden to special interests like no others - is actually a fairly accurate rendition of reality.

President Obama has no credentials: this should have been apparent during the campaign, but the pet media and the starry-eyed voters willfully ignored this and voted him in. He's their man: he is, right now, heading for failure.

And their contempt for the realities of governing this country are increasingly apparent:

Liberals are absolutely right in their frustration with the Senate. It's become an absurd institution, perhaps the least democratic legislative body in any country calling itself a democracy. It makes no sense that four or five votes can trump 54 or 55 votes. But the Senate is what it is. For now, liberals have to live with this.

Sorry: the Democrats don't want the system of checks and balances, the protection of minorities from the will of the majority. How fast they forget.

I'm sorry: I cannot have any respect for a party that thinks this way. It is abhorrent to the way the US has been governed for over 200 years, and the insinuation is that this is something that needs to be changed. Given this message, my inclination is that it is something that needs to be strengthened to prevent the tyranny of the vox populi that destroys every democracy.

Which is why we have a Republic. If we can keep it.