The President’s Plan to Deify Al Gore

Here it is, in all its gaudy, melodramatic, execrably-written mendacity: President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. Naturally, it is full of lies, half-truths, and misdirection (two glaring examples: (1) including carbon-dioxide – a non-pollutant – with genuinely toxic substances, in the grab-bag of human emissions, and (2) conflating weather and “climate change” events, so that the two phenomena are practically interchangeable, thus making it oh-so-easy to implicitly blame, say, Hurricane Sandy on carbon-fired power plants).

But what I wanted to focus on, briefly, was the dense, almost impenetrable prose, which, surely by design, is intended to maintain the nebulous opacity surrounding a “plan” that is based on the worst sort of junk science, but is nonetheless clearly intended to soak up untold trillions in government revenues. Try this on for size:

To ensure that federal energy policy meets our economic, environmental, and security goals in this changing landscape, the Administration will conduct a Quadrennial Energy Review which will be led by the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy, supported by a Secretariat established at the Department of Energy, and involving the robust engagement of federal agencies and outside stakeholders. This first-ever review will focus on infrastructure challenges, and will identify the threats, risks, and opportunities for U.S. energy and climate security, enabling the federal government to translate policy goals into a set of analytically based, clearly articulated, sequenced and integrated actions, and proposed investments over a four-year planning horizon.

Hey, I’m breathing better already!

Do you wake up screaming in the middle of the night, tortured by nightmares of cow farts? Relief is on the way:

Across the economy, there are multiple sectors in which methane emissions can be reduced, from coal mines and landfills to agriculture and oil and gas development. For example, in the agricultural sector, over the last three years, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture have worked with the dairy industry to increase the adoption of methane digesters through loans, incentives, and other assistance.

Of course, it’s simply too late to completely eliminate all threats posed by climate change, so we need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable:

By necessity, many states, cities, and communities are already planning and preparing for the impacts of climate change. Hospitals must build capacity to serve patients during more frequent heat waves, and urban planners must plan for the severe storms that infrastructure will need to withstand. Promoting on-the-ground planning and resilient infrastructure will be at the core of our work to strengthen America’s communities.

This will have the additional benefit of preparing us for the zombie apocalypse. And in case you were in doubt, the password is “resilience” (with variations):

The Obama Administration has been working to strengthen America’s climate resilience since its earliest days.

The President will direct federal agencies to identify and remove barriers to making climate-resilient investments; identify and remove counterproductive policies that increase vulnerabilities; and encourage and support smarter, more resilient investments…

To help agencies meet the above directive and to enhance local efforts to protect communities, the President will establish a short-term task force of state, local, and tribal officials to advise on key actions the federal government can take to better support local preparedness and resilience- building efforts.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology will convene a panel on disaster-resilience standards to develop a comprehensive, community-based resilience framework…

Etc., etc., ad nauseam. The thing that really sticks in my mind after wading through this La Brea tar-pit of bureaucratese is the shocking presumptuousness of the federal government, which proposes, Canute-like, to command the elements – having forgotten that Canute was, in fact, making the point that he was not omnipotent. One reads this document – increasingly dazed by the proliferation of task forces, loan guarantees, partnerships, executive orders, subsidies, community programs, interagency strategies, “Environmental Justice Progress Reports” (???), on and on – and cannot help but wonder where in the hell the federal government acquired the right, let alone the competence, to micromanage this vast and complex dynamic. And picture, if you will, this same fragmented, redundant, unmanageable schematic applied to God only knows how many other areas of life the statists have in mind for “improvement” (Health care! Immigration!)

This is what happens when we have an activist left-wing chief executive, combined with a cowed, semi-somnolent and lazy Congress, whose conservative profile is more imaginary than real. I’ll take back that last part if and when Congress refuses to fund this nonsense.