Obama's First Oval Office Speech

In his first Oval Office speech, President Obama tells us we're a bunch of oil junkies in need of green detox. Inspiring.

Because there has never been a leak of this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology. That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge...As a result of these efforts, we have directed BP to mobilize additional equipment and technology. In the coming days and weeks, these efforts should capture up to 90% of the oil leaking out of the well.

In other words, the president was quick off the mark with a science team. He lost no time. For its part, however, BP was foot dragging and directionless. But after Team Obama figured everything out scientifically, the president and his people took control, told BP what to do, and now the gusher will soon become a trickle. Hurray!

But anyone who has agonized through the drama of these eight weeks knows that this account is a fiction. There was a period when the administration was simply not engaged. Then there was a monitoring of the situation as BP attempted various capping methods. Then followed the present period of bluster as the administration became aware of how bad it looked politically to be simply looking on with concern.

So the president has decided to go to war: "we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes." He will fight it on the beaches! Having done FDR with the recession, he is now Churchill with the oil spill. He lays out a "battle plan." He has authorized deployment the National Guard (even to help with clerical work). These "troops" along with "thousands of ships and other vessels" and 30,000 additional personnel are a "mobilization" to fight back "the approaching oil" which he calls a "siege."

Of course, this is not a war that the government is capable of fighting. Only BP has the expertise and technology to get the job done, and that has proven to be shaky. But Democratic governments, especially one headed by Barack Obama, cannot stand to be viewed as anything less than omnipotent. So the president has turned to frothy declarations of being in charge.

From the bluster stage, we enter a stage of new danger: government threats, bullying, and revenge as political theatre.

I refuse to let that happen. Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.

Notice the self-reference: "I refuse to let that happen." "I will...inform him." Is he forcing BP into this arrangement based on his personal authority? Is there any legal basis for this? I haven’t heard of any. Have we departed completely from the rule of law to gangsta gov’ment?

Then he assigns a share of blame to the American people for our "addiction to fossil fuels." (He says it twice.) Addiction? We have a prosperous way of life that requires energy derived from oil and coal. Where's the addiction? Is it in our unwillingness to live they way they do in Afghanistan? Or is it our "century-long" refusal to switch to cleaner, greener forms of energy because we get the shakes if we're not burning the black stuff? No, that makes no sense. It was a presidential backhand across the public face. "Get off the oil, ya dumb slut!" Picture an alcoholic so desperate for a belt that he's drinking shoe polish. Similarly, he tells us that we are so desperate for oil and we have so depleted the earth's reserves that we are drilling a mile below the surface of the water...and now this! He doesn't mention that BP was out there with the other companies because his environmentalist dominated government wouldn't let them drill in the shallows, to say nothing of ANWAR in Alaska. No, we're the problem, and the president is going to help us dry out.

Our recovery from addiction will take a long time and will be expensive, but so was World War II and the space program that landed a man on the moon, he reminds us. So let's rise to challenge! Those were clear national security threats, however. The one involved Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and the other the USSR. The addiction threat is not so clear. Tonight, America was ready for an oil-spill-and-what-we're-doing-about-it speech. The connection between the oil spill and the need to get off oil entirely will strike most people as a leap, as indeed it should. If the president's goal tonight was not to let a crisis go to waste, but to mobilize a panicked American public behind his carbon capping and taxing legislation, he will close out the week a very disappointed man.

And here's news. Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann laying into Obama for his speech.



Where's the leadership? No tingle here.

***************

James Fallows, 25 years with The Atlantic and former Jimmy Carter speech writer, gives us three ways the Obama speech failed. Interestingly, he reminds me that George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union address told us, "America is addicted to oil." I guess that didn't upset me because he did not have a record as a chide who is constantly apologizing for his country. But he had no business making the charge either.

P.S. I also noticed those flapping hands at the bottom of the screen. Didn't they do a once through? Why wouldn't someone catch that, and advise him to keep his hands still?

Clive Crook, also of The Atlantic, says, "he would have been wise to give no speech rather than this speech."

And we'll give the final word to George Will: "Word Spill: Our Demosthenes is Alibi Ike." He says, "The news about his speech is that it is no longer news that he often gives bad speeches. This one, however, was almost magnificently awful." Whoever wrote this speech should be fired, and whoever asked for it (the guy who delivered it) should feel life changing embarrassment.

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Global Warming Debate

When I was in high school, a friend of mine who was distressed about all social and political conflict and human suffering in the world once asked, "Why don't we get six or seven scientists together, figure out what's wrong with the world, and then just do what they say?" Perhaps we could take a trial run at that proposal with something that pertains strictly to natural science. The question of climate change, its nature, direction, and human consequences, should do just fine. Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and Paul Krugman in The New York Times both recently summarized what we know about this issue, appealing to the discoveries of esteemed scientists.

So they must agree on the what's what of the matter, right? Uh, no. They could not be more sharply divided. Indeed, Paul Krugman calls opposition to the Waxman-Markey energy bill that the House just passed "treason against the planet" ("Betraying the Planet").

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

He states our situation in the gravest terms: "we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself;" and he asks,"How can anyone justify failing to act?"

Kimberley Strassel is not so unsettled over the matter ("The Climate Change Climate Change"). She denies that this is a conflict between scientists and global patriots on the one side, and opportunists and know-nothings on the other.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

Scientists have found that climate change has stalled and disasters have not materialized. Political leaders have been sobered by the economic crisis and are reassessing the panic.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

With this much passionate disagreement over climatology, I would not expect much consensus from a commission of scientists studying moral and political matters. Perhaps scientific inquiry is not as separable from moral and political issues and the passions that attend them as we would often like to believe.

Take a second look at Harold's post to which I added a response, "Baby, It's Cold Outside!" We reflect on Australian geologist and mineral economist Viv Forbes' caution, "What we need to fear is a return of the cold, dry, hungry ice ages."

Harold adds:

It seems the Aussies are far enough out of the way to be safe from the cloud of miasma surrounding the climate debate hussled up by European and Amercian socialists. Two other Australians, Ian Plimmer (a scientist and author) and Senator Steve Fielding are mentioned in a great piece by Robert Tracinski, "Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?" .

Plimmers book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science, is just about to be published in the US. It looks to be the one to read to get the arguments straight. Fielding was sceptical of the warming science, and decided to take a look for himself. Would that our own legislators had the intellectual curiosity and honesty to follow the actual science.

As to David's rumination, "Perhaps scientific inquiry is not as separable from moral and political issues and the passions that attend them as we would often like to believe" see Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argued strongly for the "sociology of knowledge"--i.e., that scientific inquiry is not in fact seperable from the passions, morals, and politics of the scientists.

David adds:


A student has just directed my attention to this at The Heritage Foundation: "An Inconvenient Voice: Dr. Alan Carlin."

Ever hear of Alan Carlin? Probably not, and that is the way the Obama Administration wants to keep it. Dr. Carlin is an Environmental Protection Agency veteran who recently wrote a damaging report, warning that the science behind climate change was questionable at best, and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy based on incomplete information.

Despite its promise to put science above politics, the Administration has suppressed Carlin’s report, banned him from writing or speaking about climate change, told him to forget about attending any meetings that addressed his main job function—climate change—and gave him a new assignment: updating a grants database. One supposes that, by dedicating its distinguished scientists to data-entry tasks, Obama’s EPA is able to free up true-believing interns to do its research.

Here is a CBS News report of the suppressed report and gag order.

Kimberley Strassel has given this injustice and public disservice even greater attention in "The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic" (Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009). "The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition."

Dr. Carlin earned a B.Sc. in physics from CalTech and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T., and has been working in public policy since 1967.

In the comments section of this Heritage Foundation post, Tim from Australia writes:

Do you think that the alarmists have a good case ? This is the answer you get when you ask them for the evidence:
1) “Your not a scientist, therefore you have no right to ask the question”,
2) “There is something morally wrong with you to even to ask the question. Your putting us all at risk”.
3) “The time for debate is over”.

There never was a debate. The real problem here is poor thinking in the western world. We simply don’t tolerate any debate anymore. Instead governments attempt to outlaw dissenting voices or at least condemn them. That’s what happens when the media becomes the de facto policy makers. It’s really very simple;

1) Media scares public with doomsday stories
2) Political parties assess public mood by focus groups and polls
3) Political parties make policy based on results

I hoped Obama would be a leader but it seems like he just looks like one. Where’s the substance?

If a janitor at the EPA wrote a piece supporting doomsday global warming scenario he would be held up as expert of some repute. No doubt he could be sighted for his/her historical studies of the increasing water levels in the toilet bowl.

These global warming skeptics in scientific academia now know what Christians are suffering who question the frail dogmas of the evolution establishment.

Your Children Will Arise and Turn You In

In an earlier post, "Life Under the Regime of Science," I shared this MasterCard "Priceless" ad to which Jonah Goldberg in The National Review drew my attention. It features a child instructing his father in how to shop in an environmentally responsible way. But the father is not asking for the advice. The cute child is presented as wiser than his young, unshaven, slightly goofy looking father who we are supposed to believe is clueless and careless. "Making dad a better man: priceless."



A reader in Ottawa, Canada, alerts us to a similar ad that was aired in our neighboring country to the north where individual liberty is viewed as a dangerous notion among those who think only politically pure thoughts.



Mr. Glennie shared these insights:

In Canada here, there are `public service announcements' that feature the `scientist' / TV host / environmental nut David Suzuki.

In this spot, Suzuki is seen sitting (in a treehouse, apparently in the middle of the night) with a group of children, who are letting him know how they are `reducing their carbon footprint.'

Then, one of the children whispers to Dear (Leader) David: `Jimmy's parents don't believe in conserving...'

Beyond the obvious question as to why a 70-year-old man would be in a treehouse at night with a group of children unrelated to him, it shows the totalitarian mindset behind present-day `environmentalism'.

After all, the lad isn't informing on "his own" parents, but those of someone else.

It is startling that neither Suzuki, the producers of the spot, nor yet the energy company that subsidizes the production cost, would have stopped to think about these things.

There is an interesting little detail they throw in. When one of the children addresses him respectfully as Dr. Suzuki, he interrupts and insists that she call him "David," and then the conversation continues. Why would Powerwise* take this extra step in undermining adult authority among children? (This "Call me David; Mr. Suzuki is my father" attitude is common enough as it is.)

*According to their website, powerWISE is funded by the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, Ontario Power Authority and local distribution companies.

Milk Bag Culture

Canada and the United States are English speaking neighboring countries in North America with British roots. The differences between the two countries can be comparable to differences within the United States, say between Wyoming and Oregon or even between Vermont and New Hampshire.

Nonetheless, there are huge differences, for example the significant differences in political culture (see, for example, "Steyn's ThoughtCrime in Canada"). But the minor differences are intriguing. Canadians use electric kettles. Americans prefer to put their kettles on the stove top. The closest you get to a plug-in kettle in America are little "hot pots" for the office where there is no stove.

Perhaps even more interesting is the Canadian use of bagged milk. I have found little reliable information on this practice (on the internet; it has not been worth my time to visit the library on this matter, but I welcome any informative comments). I have these questions: When were they introduced? Why were they introduced? Who introduced them? Why have they never caught on in the United States?

When I was a child in Georgetown, Ontario, and later in the eastern suburbs of Toronto, we would get our milk in heavy plastic, refillable one gallon jugs. We would pay a deposit on the jug and return it in exchange for the next gallon. The dairy would sterilize and re-use them. The advantage of the plastic was not that it was disposable, but that it unbreakable in normal use.

It was perhaps in the later 1970s that plastic milk bags were introduced. These are tall, lightweight, clear plastic bags that hold about 1 litre of milk. You slip it into a plastic jug and snip off the corner of the bag that is opposite the handle. The bags come in larger bags of three.

When I was in elementary school, we used to bring our books to school in the larger outer milk bags. We weren't poor. That's just what we did. Mothers would use the milk bags themselves (there is an awkward ambiguity in this phrase "milk bag") as storage bags for freezing. They would just cut off the tops, wash them out, and use a twist tie to seal them up.

It was not as if one company introduced this packaging, consumers latched on to it, and other companies followed suit with it. It all happened at once. Milk production in Canada is overseen by the Canadian Dairy Commission, established in 1966. "Canada adopted the system of supply management for industrial milk in the early 1970s.This system was established to address the unstable markets, uncertain supplies and highly variable producer and processor revenues that were common in the 1950s and 1960s." It's a little bit of Soviet efficiency in the midst of a capitalist economy.

It could not have been this government agency that co-ordinated the introduction of bagged milk however because the bags are not found in every part of Canada. Prior to the national agency, Ontario established a Milk Marketing Board which continues to regulate production, distribution and pricing. "In 1960, Ontario milk producer organizations were fragmented and lacked unity in purpose. Their bargaining position in the marketplace was very weak. Returns to the vast majority of milk producers for labour, management and investment were inadequate and there were numerous inequities and inefficiencies in the milk marketing system. Because of this chaos, the Ontario government commissioned a study in 1963 to determine how to solve what appeared to be an ever increasing problem." This "chaos" is otherwise known as the free market. Nonetheless, the OMMB was established in 1965. I don't know what the relationship is between the the CDC and the OMMB. But the Canadian approach is: "When in doubt, add another layer of government supervision." Otherwise, you might have "chaos" which leads to "inequity."

The introduction of bags could not have been for environmental reasons (or, as we would have said at the time, to reduce pollution). It was almost certainly to reduce packaging and distribution costs. The bags are lighter to ship and because they are disposable there are no retrieval and sterilization costs. From an environmental standpoint, Canadians toss less plastic than Americans do when they crush down and toss those light plastic jugs. The jugs can be recycled--though not always are, and the recycling itself burns fuel--but the bags can also be recycled as well as used for other purposes.

When I was living in Iowa for several years, a gas station food mart in Independence was promoting milk in bags and giving away the jugs, but it never caught on.

The other night, I saw some sort of twenty-fourth anniversary of the McKenzie Brothers'--billed as a Doug and Bob 2-4. They were touted as the internationally recognized emblem of Canadian culture. Even former Prime Minister Paul Martin was involved as host of the production. It was entertaining, but embarrassing and pitiful. After 140 years of confederation, that is the best we can do? I think that bagged milk tells us more about Canadians.

Say! Let's Use American Oil!

Gas is over $4 a gallon. It is a marvel that the 100% increase over the last year or so has not shocked the economy into a stupor. Yes, the dollar is weak, but as large portions of the world's population, for example China and India, begin to discover the natural means of prosperity, and thus begin consuming the way we we do, demand is bound to increase. And if the supply of oil does not increase to meet that demand, the natural measn of price regulation will give us ever higher oil prices and thus higher prices for just about everything else. Expect gas to cost $5 or $6 a gallon, maybe more, if we don't do something soon.

But it seems that the United States is potentially swimming in oil. But much of of those oil reserves are under federal lands and national parks or under coastal waters, and so environmental laws make extraction impossible...at least politically. This information comes primarily from Pete Winn of CNS News, "U.S. Policies Put Most U.S. Oil Off-Limits to Drilling" and Lawrence Kudlow's column, "More Oil, Jobs, Better Wages."

Here's what should jolt us into seriously reconsidering our priorities, however (Winn):

"there are 117 billion barrels of oil on lands owned or managed by the U.S. government"


"Adding in what's available on privately held land, the figure rises to 139 billion barrels of oil, according to the government - more than the known oil reserves of Iran, Iraq, Russia, Nigeria or Venezuela, respectively."


"The biggest untapped land-based oil deposit in the United States lies within ANWR, the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (7.7 billion barrels)."


"Much of the oil is off-limits because of the National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA), the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Historic Preservation Act."

Kudlow tells us (tipping his hat to Mark Perry at Carpe Diem):

"The Bakken fields beneath North Dakota, Montana, and Canada hold an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil. In comparison, Saudi Arabia's biggest field, Gahawar, has an estimated 55 billion barrels, while ANWR has an estimated 10.4 billion barrels."

And American voters are connecting the dots. Lawrence Kudlow tells us that, according to Gallup, over the last year "support for more drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas has increased to 57% from 41%."

This is a national security issue and it is a love of neighbor issue. We make opportunity cost decisions on the environment all the time. It is not an absolute value. We pave over "the environment" for roads and housing. We sacrifice it to mineral extraction and recreation. People have to live. It is time to start using Amrican oil sources instead of paying some of the most evil and dangerous people in the world astronomical prices for theirs.

Appendix:

"The Moral Imperative for Drilling" by Victor Davis Hanson (New York Post). He tries to address liberals on their own terms. "Instead of objecting to the view of a derrick from the California hills above the Santa Barbara coast, shouldn't a liberal estate owner instead console himself that the offshore pumping will help a nearby farm worker or carpenter get to work without going broke?...At best, the transfer of wealth to most oil producers means a Chinese worker working longer for less money while artificial island resorts pop up in the Persian Gulf. At worst, that strapped Chinese is also working harder for another Iranian centrifuge, al Qaeda landmine or Saudi-funded madrassa."

"Drill! Drill! Drill!" by Daniel Henninger (Wall Street Journal). "While other nations use their oil reserves to attain world status, we give ours up. Why shouldn't they conclude that, long term, these people can be taken? Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Forget that. We'll do it ourselves."

McCain and the Church of Global Warming

Larry Thornberry has the relevant question of the day:

If Republicans are going to be stampeded by phony environmental alarms and propose terrible public policies in the name of these scams, what the hell do we need Democrats for?

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13211

Bjorn Lomborg, one of the few sensible environmentalists alive today, has a cost/benefit analysis of Kyoto here: hint--it's throwing dollars into the wind for pennies in return.

UK Guardian: Money for Nothing - Björn Lomborg

And David Limbaugh, brother to Rush, gets to the nub:

It is not Earth's ecosystem that hangs in the balance, but America's future. Those whose vision isn't blurred by green-colored glasses and the temptation to win accolades from the leftist-dominated culture can see that the global push to "save the planet" is more about destroying capitalism, private property and Western culture than sound, science-based environmental stewardship. Never mind the staggering contradiction that free market economies produce cleaner environs.

http://www.davidlimbaugh.com/mt/archives/2008/05/new_column_john_1.html#more