Obama drops climate change talk as green movement fizzles

baltimoresun.com
The public is increasingly skeptical of global warming and far more worried about the economy than the environment
By 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 Mr. 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," Mr. Plumer laments.

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 President Obama's remarks in his weekly radio address last weekend. It was all about energy policy, yet not once did he talk about climate change.

In one sense that's odd, given that without global warming, his energy policy goes from merely misguided to outright bonkers. After all, if you wanted to create non-exportable jobs, wean America off foreign oil or pursue energy independence from the Middle East, absent any concerns about climate change or releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, you would unleash America's massive energy reserves in coal, gas and oil. According to the Congressional Research Service, hardly a mouthpiece for Big Oil, the U.S. has the largest energy resources of any country, Saudi Arabia and Russia included.
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Skepticism about the existence of a problem or its scope has been rising in the U.S. and Europe. When a Pew poll in January asked voters what their biggest priorities were, climate changed ranked second to last. Only obesity was deemed less of a priority. (Don't tell Michelle Obama.)

Even Madison Avenue has noticed. The New York Times reports that increasingly budget-conscious consumers are no longer willing to shell out extra for self-described "green products." As a result, the number of new Earth-friendly products has plummeted. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has largely abandoned its failed experiment with becoming a proletarian purveyor of green goods no one wants to buy.

Why has climate change lost its oomph? Ms. Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.)
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President Obama's claims are dubious at best. In supposedly pioneering China, high-speed rail has been a boondoggle of biblical proportions. Green jobs destroy more jobs than they create, and they pay less. In Spain, Mr. Obama's favorite clean-energy innovator, one study found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed for every one that was created. Indeed, across Europe, massive investments in wind and solar simply haven't paid off.
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President Obama and the greens are in an exquisite bind. Without economic recovery, Americans won't support Mr. Obama's "investments," but his investments are a hindrance to recovery.article