That was the question posed by Fred Dalton Thompson, minority counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, and asked by his boss Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking minority member of that committee, that some say ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It may be a question that now needs to be asked, in earnest, of President Barack Obama with regard to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. According to columnist Kevin McCullough,
It seems incomprehensible that the president and other members of the administration still have jobs when it is now being reported that the federal government was apprised by BP on February 13 that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was leaking oil and natural gas into the ocean floor.
In fact, according to documents in the administration's possession, BP was fighting large cracks at the base of the well for roughly ten days in early February.
Further it seems the administration was also informed about this development, six weeks before to the rig's fatal explosion when an engineer from the University of California, Berkeley, announced to the world a near miss of an explosion on the rig by stating, "They damn near blew up the rig."
It's also now being reported that BP was asking for the administration's help on this matter long before the deadly accident and the now gushing well of tar.
If this is true, then the administration's inaction—because they were unwilling to take their focus off getting ObamaPelosiCare passed?—was reprehensible. What did the President know, and when did he know it? It's easy to see why he's taking the "I was as surprised as you were" tack, telling us he accepted the assurances of others that nothing would go wrong; but if he truly, honestly didn't know about this—why not, and what does that say about his administration?
I've been thinking about the President's Oval Office speech last week, and about his response to the BP disaster more generally. I saw Gov. Palin take him apart:
That wasn't surprising, of course, but watching Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews hit him even harder definitely was:
Even harder on the President—no real surprise, since he's less of a partisan than the MSDNC guys—was Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times in his "Top of the Ticket" blog:
It's probably too late now, but this administration that's so fond of appointing "czars" for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:
This is no certainty, but depending how things play out, we might see a short-term but serious dip in world temperatures:
In a cosmically ironic twist of fate and timing, nature may be set to empirically freeze any and all anthropogenic global warming talk: a blast of Arctic cold may encase the earth in an icy grip not seen for 200 years.
This is not alarmist fantasy or 2012 babble—several natural forces that are known to cause cooling are awakening simultaneously, raising speculation of a “perfect storm” of downward pressures on global temperature. These forces let loose one at a time can cause the Earth to cool and can bring about harsh winter conditions. If they all break free at once, the effects could be felt not just in the coming winter, but year-round, and for several years to come.
Read the whole thing for the details. As you can probably guess, we should all be watching Iceland’s volcanoes very closely.
The theory of anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming is in serious trouble, but you wouldn’t know it if you get your news from the big U.S. outlets. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a list of climate stories broken by the British media that have been ignored by the American media. His list is an impressive one, and it doesn’t even include the Daily Mail story challenging the credibility of Dr. Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The evidence mounting against AGW—and against the integrity and credibility of the folks pushing it—has grown to such an extent that even Canada’s Grey Lady, the Globe and Mail, felt compelled to take note of it; but the New York Times? Fuhgeddabouddit. When your motto is All the News that’s Fit to Print, and “fit to print” means that which fits your agenda, then clearly, there’s no reason to take notice of such inconvenient stories. “When the facts and the politics conflict, sir, print the politics.”
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
—Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV)
I argued last week that Genesis 1-2 shows us God creating his temple—the natural world—and setting up his image within it—namely, human beings; as such, I contend, we need to understand ourselves as his viceroys over creation, stewards given the task of governing the world he has made, but under his authority, not our own. As I pointed out, this is a democratization of the pervasive idea among Israel’s pagan neighbors that the king was the image and representative of the god and everyone else was second-class.
Operationally, though, what does this say about human beings? The answer is, I think, that verses 26-27, God creating human beings in his own image, find their first application in the command he gives the first man and woman in verse 28: rule the earth and fill it with people. This is what is commonly known as the “cultural mandate.”
Unfortunately, this verse has been misused over the years to justify environmental irresponsibility. There are those who argue that since God gave us dominion over all the other creatures and told us to rule the earth and subdue it, we have the right to do whatever we want with whatever part of the planet we happen to own; and there are far too many in the American church who have gone along with this kind of thinking.
It’s a completely wrongheaded interpretation of the verse, however, for two reasons. First, this command was given to sinless people—it cannot be used to justify sinful actions. Second, when God says, “Rule the earth, subdue it,” and so on, he gets to define what that means and how it’s appropriate to carry out his command. This is one aspect of the basic message of these two chapters: God made the world, and as such he’s the Lord of everything that is; that means he gets to make the rules, not us.
As such, Genesis 1:28 doesn’t mean that God created us to rule the world as we see fit, or that we have the right to do whatever we want with it; rather, it means that he created us to govern it under his authority, as his deputies. The world doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to him; it isn’t our property to exploit, it’s our responsibility to care for according to his will. Creation is his temple, and we are its caretakers and stewards.
As such, the dominion over the earth which God gave us—and which we still have; he didn’t take it back once our first ancestors fell into sin—isn’t a privilege, it’s a duty. Yes, it entitles us to draw support from the earth and its plants and animals, for those who labor deserve a fair share of the harvest; but the key is that we work for the good of all creation, including our fellow human beings.
And if we don’t? If we use God’s creation selfishly, abusing it for our own personal gain? Then rest assured, we will be held accountable. Thomas Jefferson, musing on the evil institution of American slavery, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever”; and he trembled with good reason. As Paul writes in Galatians 6:7, “Don’t be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” We will be held accountable by God for what we have done with the world he has given us—for the pollution in our air and water, and for the pollution in our culture. We have abused the earth and we have abused our fellow human beings, and the one is a sin as surely as the other. Our call and our responsibility is to take care of our world—including its people—for the God who made us all, and it is not a task to be taken lightly.
Understanding this is essential to free us from idea that the world exists simply for us to use, which reduces mountains and trees to raw materials and people to assets and resources. God didn’t create us to be resources or assets for someone else’s benefit, and he didn’t create the mountains and trees we see out our windows merely to be raw materials. We may use the trees for wood, and we may draw on other people’s gifts to do things which need to be done, but we must always remember that that’s not all they’re for. Even as we cut individual trees, we need to care for the forest, and the land on which it grows; and even as we take advantage of other people’s gifts to accomplish our purposes, we need to be careful that we aren’t taking advantage of other people. The justice of God demands no less.
One of the most interesting stories of the past couple of months has been the whole Climategate scandal. I'm not going to dig that up and rehash the substance of it (though if you didn't see Bill's posts on the Thinklings about the lousy quality of the computer models behind the anthropogenic global-warming argument and the dubious nature of the standard assertions that the results of such models are truly properly peer-reviewed, you ought to), I just wanted to throw an observation out there. To wit, I recognized the spirit in those leaked e-mails, with their insistence that the theory must be right regardless of the data, and their willingness to adjust the facts as needed to fit the dogma: it's the spirit of fundamentalism. It's the exact same tone one meets in people arguing that the Earth must be only 6,000 years old and therefore, whatever facts that would seem to indicate otherwise must be incorrect.
Now, to call someone a fundamentalist doesn't mean they're wrong, by any means. I don't happen to believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and I don't happen to believe in AGW, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one or both couldn't be correct. But the spirit in which many who call themselves Christian fundamentalists argue (which is not, be it noted, equal with fundamentalism itself; one can hold to fundamentalist positions without this sort of attitude and approach) is one which is absolutely certain it has discovered the truth, unquestioningly convinced of its own rightness, and thus is committed to maintaining its position by whatever means necessary. This is the sort of spirit one also finds in Islamic fundamentalism—and it's the spirit that's in view as well in Michael Mann and the leaked CRU e-mails.
Again, that doesn't mean their position is wrong; to argue that would be to commit the genetic fallacy. It does, however, give the lie to their claims that they alone are scientific and their opponents are anti-science. In truth, what we have here is a religious dispute, complete with threats by the high priests against the heretics; and the pretensions of those high priests to be above ideology, their insistence that they are disinterested seekers of the pure flame of fact, have been shown to be a sham. This will be, I think, the long-term effect of Climategate: it's knocked AGW proponents off their pedestal, and I don't think they're going to be able to climb back up.
We have a center-left grassroots political action organization here in Indiana, focused on state environmental and energy issues, that comes around once a year wanting petition signatures on whatever their latest issue is—so far, it’s always been something beating up on the energy companies and always something to do with coal-fired plants. I was amused to note that this year, they have two big pushes: one against the local utility, and one against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman-Markey or the cap-and-trade bill. I wouldn’t have expected that second one, but here was this self-labeled hippie solemnly explaining to me that Waxman-Markey is a bad bill because it’s nothing more than a massive bailout for the coal industry; the way he talked about it, you would have expected to find it was a Republican idea.
The sheet he handed me described the bill thusly:
While Americans have been clamoring for a national energy policy that helps their pocketbooks and the environment, Congress has caved to special interests and drafted a bill that is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the utility industry. ACES . . . was railroaded through the U. S. House (by a vote of 219-212) without proper public input. Now in the U. S. Senate, the bill is subject to even more manipulation from coal and utility lobbying.
The claim is that ACES, drafted in large part by Duke Energy, will protect ratepayers, reduce carbon emissions, and help solve global warming. But it is an attempt to maintain business as usual in the electric utility industry.
The reason for ACES is that in the past 2 to 3 years numerous coal plants have been cancelled because lenders would not assume the risk of financing overly expensive and polluting coal-fire power plants that take years to build. . . .
Coal plants are already financially unviable. Now utility companies need ACES to keep their coal plants running and have an excuse to build more.
Not “a” reason, mind you—“the” reason. The folks who put this together seem completely convinced that there is no environmental motivation behind the cap-and-tax bill at all, only the desire to do favors for coal and energy producers. I don’t have a very high opinion of Nancy Pelosi (who hails from that noted coal-producing city of San Francisco) or Harry Reid (I’m sure coal is king in Nevada, too), but even to me, that seems unduly cynical. Still, if what they’re saying about all the loopholes that have been written in for utility companies is correct, that is indeed another good reason to oppose this very bad bill; and if those of us who oppose it from the Right can make common cause with folks on the Left to bring it down, so much the better.
In addition to my snark in the previous post, I do have a serious comment on the BBC's admission that the Earth has been cooler since 1998—or perhaps I should say, sparked by that article. The remarkable thing about that article is that it's a deviation from the liberal political orthodoxy on global warming (and it is a political orthodoxy, for all that it claims scientific status), which is not the sort of thing one expects from the BBC. Of course, it was a deviation driven by the facts; the author of the article did his best to uphold the global-warming storyline anyway, but facts are hard things to get around.
Which brings up the problem I have with the global-warming orthodoxy: it's an orthodoxy based on an agenda. The agenda itself is not necessarily bad; in fact, I agree with its declared goals, though I disagree with the socialist/big-government approach to reaching them. From both a theological and a public-health perspective, as well as with an eye to future unexpected consequences, it's obviously important that we continue to reduce pollution; I just think that encouraging innovation rather than regulating it is likely to be more productive in doing so.
The problem is, rather, that what we have here is an agenda in search of a crisis, because whipping up a crisis and motivating people by fear is considered to be the quickest and most effective way to drive action, particularly when that action involves expanding government control over the economy and people's lives. The agenda comes first, and it looks for a plausible threat to which to attach itself, so as to be able to tell people that they must enact the agenda or Bad Things will happen. This is what we might call the Houghton Strategy, after Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”
Now, the problem with that is that even when it finds success at first, that approach will ultimately collapse. Eventually, as even a global-warming believer like Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, the facts refuse to cooperate, and the truth becomes inconvenient for the agenda. That's when you get people rooting for disaster, because they'd rather be proved miserably right than happily wrong; getting their own way is the most important thing to them, and they react accordingly.
That's when orthodoxy gets ugly, and when it fails. I am, obviously, not opposed to all orthodoxies as such; I believe there's such a thing as truth, and that fact provides at least a philosophical and theoretical justification for orthodoxy (and, in my view, a good bit more than that). Humble orthodoxy that arises out of the search for truth and that recognizes that it is at best an imperfect grasp on that truth is, I firmly believe, a good thing; it's also a flexible thing, able to discern what is truly essential and what isn't. Orthodoxy that arises out of an agenda, however—that exists in service not to the truth and the desire for understanding, but to the desire to do certain things—is of necessity dogmatic and inflexible; it also tends to end up being shrill, because it's forced to defend itself and advance its cause through denunciations and alarmist statements. By its very nature, it's committed not to understanding what is true, but to winning the argument—and when winning is everything, it very quickly becomes the only thing, and all other concerns (such as truth and fairness) fall by the wayside, leaving behind only a naked power grab.
This applies to orthodoxies of all types—political, religious, cultural, scientific, legal, you name it. You can meet this in the church (whether the local congregation or the international denomination), in politics at every level, in business, and indeed in most spheres of human life. You can find it among the cynical and power-hungry, and in the hearts of the most selfless and altruistic. It is a universal danger for all of us who are strongly committed to any belief or set of beliefs: are we truly seeking to under-stand the truth, to pursue it and stand under it and allow it to shape us, or are we concerned with winning the argument, with being acknowledged to be right, whether in fact we are or not?
I didn't have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it's taken a while to get back to it, but I can't help thinking that we've seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn't even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,
Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers' amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk's desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.
But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..." How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?
Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can't even wait until members of Congress know what they're voting on.
There's supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that's the "trade" part of "cap-and-trade"); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn't been written yet—there was only a "placeholder." Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they'd put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when he refused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn't encouraging.
More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren't going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, and Investor's Business Daily have all laid it out:
As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).
Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.
Hit hardest by all this would be the "95% of working families" Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they'll be hit by this draconian energy tax.
Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won't actually take effect until 2012, so that it won't mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:
For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.
But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.
That's not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we're trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will only increase it.
America's biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .
"It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment," Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .
The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.
"They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don't carry the same level of carbon costs," said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.
According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.
Doesn't sound all that impressive, does it? It's partly because the countries to which we'll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:
If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.
Now, it seems to me there's hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn't have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a "mini-filibuster." The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page "managers' amendment," so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn't know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.
Here are a few things I've been meaning to get around to posting on (for quite a while—I think I ran across all of these back in March) that just aren't likely to get their own posts at this point; so I'll toss them out for your interest, and if I ever do get around to putting up a longer post on any of them, well, the duplication won't hurt anything.
Beryllium 10 and climate The science in this is not immediately transparent to the non-specialist, but it's interesting evidence that climate change is far more about what the sun does than about CO2.
In the closing days of his Administration, President Bush removed gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list.
Obama's Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, has decided to support President Bush's position on the issue and leave the wolves off the list, prompting outrage from the eco-nuts in Obama's base.
How long before we see Ashley Judd attacking Obama in web ads?
UPDATE: Steve Altman in the comments points out an interesting development: Only two days after his much-publicized lifting of a federal funding ban on research involving human embryos (therefore causing Christopher Reeve to walk again), he has signed into law essentially the exact same ban as part of the Omnibus Spending Bill. So he's basically wasted everybody's time with a bunch of posturing while accomplishing precisely nothing for his base.
Speaking as a former Coloradan who remembers when Secretary Salazar was Colorado Attorney General Salazar, I'm not at all surprised by his action; he represents a Western sensibility on the environment, one that seeks to balance environmental concerns with the needs of people, not the views of the East Coast elite. I don't always agree with his positions, to be sure, but I expected him to chart a balanced, thoughtful course at Interior, and so far, I've seen nothing to make me think otherwise.
As for the Obama administration's sleight of hand on ESCR, that's no vast surprise either; I wasn't aware that that language was a standard part of the national budget, but since the whole thing combines passing the buck to Congress with a symbolic action that produces no practical effect, two things which we've seen over and over again during the first two months of this administration, there's nothing startling here.
is the distinguished cosmologist and mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, of Tulane University. His letter of a few weeks ago (which I missed at the time) to blogger William Katz, detailing the agenda-driven work behind this issue and its relationship to government funding of research, and the developing efforts to suppress scientific challenges to global-warming theory (since its supporters can't disprove them, they must resort to force to silence them), should concern anyone who cares about the state of scientific research in the West.
Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say.
Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people's yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.
Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast.
"One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles," said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. "One pelican hit a boat in Monterey."
The worrisome thing is, we don't know why; no one has yet come up with an explanation that fits the facts. Here's hoping someone does soon, and that it's something we can address.
courtesy of Harold Ambler in HuffPo (which is nowhere I would have expected to see global warming called "the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind," but there you go). He does a nice job of exposing the baloney "science" underlying global-warming claims (including a point about the limited ability CO2 has to absorb heat); perhaps more importantly, he also points out that bowing to global-warming hysteria would misdirect our environmental efforts and do considerable damage to the world economy—which would not only increase human suffering, it would also further damage the global environment by moving the world collectively back toward more primitive, and dirtier, technologies for energy generation.
One of my fellow debaters in high school used to say, "I'm pro-environment, but anti-environmentalist." Issues like this make me think he was right.
in more ways than one. Rabb/Kinetico Water Systems is a company based here in Warsaw that makes non-electrical home water systems (that, as I understand it, is where "Kinetico" comes in) that use far less salt than your typical electrical water softener; that also means, as I understand it, a lot less water wastage with their systems. They do good work with a good product; they also do good work in other ways, as Don Clemens, the company's president, is one of the founders and leaders of Men Following Christ, a local Christian ministry. They're admirable folks, and it's good to see them getting a little attention beyond our community here: the Times-Union, our local paper, reported last week that PBS and Hugh Downs had filmed a segment on Rabb/Kinetico for the network's "National Environmental Report." I don't know when that will be airing, but I hope to catch it (maybe it will be on the PBS website).
Pauline at Perennial Student has a post up about offshore drilling (which is just as much about the different ways the story can be spun by the media, depending on whom you read and what their agenda is); she has some good links and even better commentary. I particularly appreciated the introduction to SOS California, a group working to find ways to capture/recover oil that naturally seeps into the ocean—thereby both providing energy and reducing pollution. I'd never heard of them before, but may their tribe increase.
