Jonah Goldberg:
'What the heck went wrong?" That, apparently, is the question roiling the environmental community as it realizes that the fight against climate change has fizzled.
As Brad Plumer writes in The New Republic, everything was looking great in 2008 for a sweeping effort to make good on candidate Barack Obama's pledge to start turning back the rising oceans. The Democrats held Congress. Both John McCain and Obama had promised to push for capping carbon emissions. Corporations had gotten on board. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" had seemingly softened up the public to the point where it might go along with whatever a popular president promised.
"Instead, the climate push was . . . a total flop," laments Plumer. And, of course, he's right -- though not entirely for the reasons he claims.
Climate change is dead as a major political issue for the foreseeable future. Don't believe me? Check out Obama's remarks in his weekly radio address last weekend. It was all about energy policy, and yet not once did he talk about climate change.
In one sense, that's odd: Without global warming, his energy policy goes from merely misguided to outright bonkers.
After all, if you wanted to create non-exportable jobs or pursue energy independence from the Middle East, absent any concerns about releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, you'd unleash America's massive energy reserves of coal, gas and oil. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has the largest energy resources of any country -- Saudi Arabia and Russia included.
But in another sense it's not odd -- because telling voters that they must pay high gas prices to ineffectually fight climate change would be honest but incalculably dumb, politically.
Recent polling shows that Americans care about the economy more -- a lot more -- than global warming....
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Obama has tried to pivot to "clean energy" but everyone knows it is the same old expensive inefficient alternative to real energy. People do not want to pay for it or for cap and trade. They are not happy about paying more for gas as Obama locks up our energy resources. The Democrats have lost the argument and the Republicans can only hope they keep pushing inefficient and expensive energy.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
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