Turning Green Into Gold

By Deb Jordahl

It is becoming clear that global warming legislation is more about preserving government programs than it is about saving the environment. If you don’t believe me, just ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  A few weeks ago, Pelosi told Capitol reporters, that climate change legislation was not likely to happen in the coming year.  “I'm not sure this year, because I don't know if we'll be ready."   But this week the Speaker is singing a different tune, and if you spin the record backwards, you can actually hear Pelosi chanting, “Show me the money.”

 In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle this week, Pelosi said:

"I believe we have to because we see that as a source of revenue," she said, noting that proposed cap-and-trade bills would raise billions of dollars by forcing major emitters to buy credits to release greenhouse gases.

Pelosi voiced similar sentiments in February of 2007when she said, “I see this as an economic opportunity, and a place where green can be gold for our country." This is on par with her argument that boosting the funding for family planning services will help get the economy moving again.

And if dwindling government finances weren’t enough to give political leaders the hotfoot, global warming reality is about to bite them harder. The Midwest’s most recent arctic cold snap, formerly an event that harkened fond memories of late summer pregnancies in Wisconsin, now calls to mind Vice President Gore ‘s proclamation: “People are sweltering out there. How much longer will politicians with their heads in the sand hold out for doing nothing?”

Politicians like Pelosi, and leaders of secular religions like Gore, know that public skepticism is growing about global warming: whether it is real, whether or how much of it is man-made, whether mankind can control the climate or should simply adapt to it (as we have for millennia) and whether the benefits of proposed legislation to limit carbon emissions outweigh the costs. 

The public’s skepticism is being fueled by cooling temperatures and their concerns about energy costs and environmental regulations which have contributed to the greatest loss of manufacturing jobs in our nation’s history.  Add evidence that Arctic ice is forming at a record pace, and the sense is growing that we have no need to regulate our economy using radical environmental policy. Do Democrats really care about the livelihoods of the average worker?

The inherent danger in not acting on global warming is that politicians will have to find some other excuse to impose massive new taxes on gas and coal to beef up state and federal budgets. "It’s for the polar bears" sounds so much better than "we need your money because we have no way to fund the massive increases in government entitlement programs we’ve been expanding for years."

Perhaps we can attribute the current cooling trend to our efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the nine years since Father Gore uttered those words.  It will be a shame if history revealed Gore as nothing more than a blowhard who used his bully pulpit to try and destroy our economy and our way of life, but it will be an even bigger shame if Gore and his good friend Nancy Pelosi are permitted to succeed.

-January 29, 2009

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