Global warming is the current issue that will be forgotten again next week, but while the watermelons demonstrated in New York City where President Obama spoke at the Climate Summit at the United Nations, former Bush (II) Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ran his mouth at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.
A Republican that leftists turn to for a good “enviro-kumbaya” session came through with the rhetoric again this week. Most recently known for his partnership with statists Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg in the shame-the-capitalists effort called “Risky Business,” Paulson delivered a financial market parallelism on climate change that any Occupy Wall Streeter would be proud of.
On what seemed to be a randomly assembled panel of non-experts that also included the Rockefeller Foundation’s Judith Rodin and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt (famous for the selfies she took with President Obama at Nelson Mandela’s memorial), Paulson likened the human production of greenhouse gas emissions to the 2008 gorging on consumer debt. According to a report by Kitco News (published by Forbes.com), American policies that “encourage the overuse” of fossil fuels are like the incentives from financial institutions that stimulated over-borrowing for homes.
“I am looking at this through the lens of risk,” Paulson said on Monday. “Climate change is not only a risk to the environment but it is the single biggest risk that exists to the economy today.”
Of course the former Goldman Sachs CEO was speaking to the angle (the business world) that is supposed to be his expertise, ostensibly so that he’d have enough credibility to speak on a panel to address a scientific topic he either knows nothing about, or wants to demagogue to his own benefit. Either way the untruths he spoke were blatant.
“One thing the government doesn’t do very well,” Paulson continued, “is focus on controversial issues, if they are longer term in nature. If you don’t take action there is a huge fiscal risk.” According to Kitco News, Paulson warned that if global warming isn’t addressed, there will be more “natural disasters, floodings and the Hurricane Sandys.”
Perhaps the only true statement he made is about government not doing things well. But in the case of climate, the American government (as well as other countries) has spent billions of dollars to study and address the myth of global warming. It’s a cause for which the government-funded scientists say there is never enough taxpayer dollars to research, and one that renewable energy investors say there are never enough subsidies for.
As for the “risks” (hence “Risky Business”), the “experts” have predicted the catastrophes for decades and they’re still no-shows. There has been no warming of the planet for nearly 18 years. No rainfall records have been broken since 1996 and most existing records pre-date the 1950s. And we’ve been in a major hurricane drought for the U.S. for nine years, with a much-weakened Sandy causing destruction to the mid-Atlantic coast more because of its heavy population rather than storm strength.
Nevertheless it was upon the false premise of coming calamity that Paulson urged action by both business and government, which he said should come in the form of levying a tax on life-giving carbon dioxide (not the more dastardly-sounding “carbon”).
“If you want to avoid the very worst outcomes, you need policy measures that are incentives for new clean-tech technologies,” he said.
Never-mind that the failed Obama stimulus wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on those still-failing “green” technologies such as wind, solar, biofuels, and electric vehicles – all of which still demand ongoing government subsidies to survive. And just purge from your memory the failed Chicago Climate Exchange scheme co-founded by Paulson himself, which initially brought several heavy-hitting companies aboard to trade carbon dioxide emission credits (called “carbon offsets”) to help build up alternative energy and tree-planting in Brazil.
Despite his experience as Treasury Secretary with the 2008 housing bubble, in which he foolishly engineered bailouts of financial institutions that only prolonged the recession, Paulson misses the failure of his analogy of that experience to global warming. He is so blind by climate alarmism that he is missing what the real bubble is: the massive subsidization of inefficient, expensive renewable energy. Instead he attacked the “skeptics” who have the scientific evidence – validated by observations, not climate models – on their side.
“Short-term is the enemy out there,” he said at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting. “To begin with, when people say it doesn’t make economic sense, I want to scream out ‘bullsh**.’”
The evidence – both climatological and and economic – are clear. There’s been a long-enough track record to show the catastrophic predictions were false, and the self-sustaining capabilities of renewable energy don’t exist. Thus it’s Paulson who’s shoveling the cow manure for public consumption.
Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center and publishes CarolinaPlottHound.com, an aggregator of North Carolina news.